The Last of the Lumbermen Read online

  As abruptly as it appeared — whatever “it” is — it lets up. The vise gripping my chest lets go enough to let me get a breath, the hot steel rods pull back. I suck in some air and release it. I can literally taste the oxygen.

  There’s another, more tactile sensation. Esther’s hand is on my shoulder. “Are you okay?”

  I straighten up and shrug. “Fine. My back just gave me a little twinge there.”

  She’s eyeing me. “Really?”

  “Really,” I insist. “Let’s go see Jack.”

  WE TAKE THE LINCOLN, and using the sore back excuse I ask Esther to drive. Gord and Wendel climb into the rear seats.

  “I love this car,” Gord says. “It’s damn near the only kind left I can sit in the back seat of without it feeling like it’s going to flip over on top of me.”

  “Yeah,” Wendel agrees, “and if you were any bigger I’d have to sit on your knee.”

  “Well,” Gord laughs, “it wouldn’t be the first time.”

  In the front passenger seat, I’m having a hard time listening. Bubbling from the memory of those steel rods — despite my efforts to stay in control — is panic, and a weird sort of shame. I’ve always been one of those people who sails through injury and pain as if it’s nothing special — broken bones, sprained joints, that sort of thing. But this isn’t an injury, and, worse, I can’t see it because it’s inside me. If it was a heart attack, it could have just been a warning shot across the bow, a minor tremor. The real one, the big one that’s going to do me, might arrive any second.

  Esther keeps on glancing at me suspiciously as she drives. I’m thankful that the already-fading light isn’t giving her much. I keep my face averted, looking out the window, until we reach the parking lot outside the hospital emergency ward. At least we’re in the right place if the big cranker comes.

  Comforted by that thought, I pull myself together as Esther glides the Lincoln into a parking spot. It isn’t a huge effort to get myself out of the car, and that’s comforting too. Maybe I’ll be okay.

  I keep up, barely, as the four of us hustle to the emergency ward’s entrance. We all know the nurse on the desk by name — the emergency staff are used to seeing Mohawk players in here after games — and since she’s expecting us she waves us in the direction of one of the cubicles, without bothering with any chit-chat.

  Jack is composed and still, so drugged that even speaking is tricky. Now that the hockey game is over Gord is willing to be a doctor again, and he doesn’t have time for small talk. He busies himself with the X-rays Milgenberger left for him on the bedside trolley and leaves the bedside comforting to me.

  Jack’s damaged knee is raised slightly above the bed in a traction sling. It doesn’t look shredded from the outside, just bloated. It occurs to me that my heart might have the same appearance.

  “You don’t look so bad,” I say, dousing that last thought and giving the bed a small test nudge. “I was expecting a corpse.”

  “Check inside my knee, there,” he mumbles.

  “I’ll leave the autopsy to Gord. Where did they put Junior?”

  “Couple of stalls down,” Jack answers, ignoring the attempt at play. “Pretty noisy when they brought him in. And stop pushing on the bed, you nitwit. It moves fine, but my knee is strapped to the ceiling.”

  He closes his eyes, and Gord elbows me out of the way. “I’ll go check on Junior,” I say, and slip through the curtain.

  I find Junior three stalls away, his forehead swathed in bandages, the eye beneath it puffed and starting to discolour. He’s stopped babbling and jumping around, but he’s still a few sandwiches short of a picnic. He’s also a lot uglier than Jack, but it’s hard to get a bead on how hurt he really is.

  While I’m questioning him, or trying to, a nurse slips into the cubicle, checks his eyes, and makes small talk. Junior tries to paw her aside, wanting — now that he realizes it’s me in the cubicle with him — to know how the game went.

  “We won,” I tell him, carefully nonchalant. “Seven-six. We got some lucky goals.”

  “How did Lagace do?”

  “He did fine,” I say, holding the pose. “He made a few saves, but he didn’t really have much to do.”

  Junior recognizes that I’m lying to him. “Don’t you try to shit me, Weaver,” he says. “If they only scored two goals in two periods, that little horse’s ass must have been doing cartwheels.”

  “Stan’s just a dumb kid,” I answer, cutting through the bullshit to his real question. “You’re our goalie.”

  Gord and Wendel slip into the cubicle, and Wendel promptly sticks his foot in it.

  “It isn’t that Stan’s so great,” he says. “It’s that you’re so lousy.”

  Gord clears his throat to stifle what looks suspiciously to me like laughter. “What he’s saying is that if you wore a mask you’d be a better goalie than Stan is.”

  Wendel jams the other foot in. “Right,” he says. “Why don’t you wear a goddamned mask? If you did, you wouldn’t be here and we wouldn’t be telling you this.”

  “It’s a tradition,” Junior answers. “I can’t break that.”

  “Being stupid is a tradition?” Wendel hoots. “Since when?”

  I can’t help myself. “Around here? Since about 1792. We have a God-given right to be stupid and ignorant.”

  Gord gives me a dirty look. “Well, you know how it goes, Junior,” he says. “Traditions are supposed to make your life better and deeper. If they don’t, it seems to me that you’re free to get rid of them. When your old man started playing hockey, there was no such thing as goalie masks. Now there is. You wouldn’t be any less a man if you used one. Just a better goalie.”

  Junior’s eyes glaze over. “My old man would never let me live it down.”

  Gord isn’t having any of it. “Screw your old man. He would have been a better goalie if he’d started using a mask. And he might have lasted longer, too.”

  Junior is starting to whine. “What about you? You don’t wear headgear.”

  Gord laughs. “They don’t make helmets big enough. I can’t help it if the manufacturers think hockey players are all pinheads. I’d love to be able to wear one. I’d probably wear a visor if I could.”

  “I dunno if that’s such a good idea,” I interject. “If you had a visor you’d stop murdering those jerks who come at you with their sticks up. What would become of the rest of us?”

  “Maybe you’re right,” Gord admits. “Someone has to take care of you pussies.”

  Esther, who has been listening through the curtain without entering, leans in. “Hey, you guys,” she says, “the Ratsloffs just arrived. Maybe you ought to stay inside the curtain there until they’ve gone.”

  “I guess I really ought to apologize to JoMo,” Gord says, and slips out. The truth is, the Ratsloffs aren’t too bad off the ice unless they’ve been drinking. I follow Gord over to the cubicle, where they’re crowding around JoMo, laughing and joking.

  JoMo, when I catch sight of him, does look pretty funny. He’s got a tin snozzle over his ruined nose, held there by twin stripes of thick white tape that end at his jowls and his hairline. A pair of spectacular shiners are blooming around his eyes. In a few days, they’ll be glorious. From each of his nostrils hang fuses of cotton batting, there to hold the cartilage in place from the inside. Good thing snot isn’t flammable. Even his own kin would have trouble keeping themselves from putting a match to those fuses and blowing up JoMo’s remaining brains.

  It’s hard to tell if JoMo is pissed off or not. He isn’t talking — he’s had his nose broken before, and knows that one word from him will have his relatives honking and huffing in imitation. He and Gord simply nod to one another.

  “Sorry I caught you on the beak,” Gord says.

  In answer, JoMo shakes his head once and shrugs. Part of the game, he’s saying. A couple of the
Ratsloffs nod to me as I stop to pay my respects to JoMo. I don’t have much to say to him except “Tough break,” which he accepts with an expression that could be a smile. None of the Ratsloffs ask about Jack. That’s part of the game too, as far as they’re concerned.

  ON THE WAY OUT I mention to Jack that I appointed the kid stickboy, and he goes through the roof.

  “You can’t do that without an insurance release,” he scolds when he calms down. “If the little bugger gets nailed by a puck on the bench his parents would end up owning half the city.”

  Sounds reasonable to me, but there’s a simple solution. “Where are you hiding the release forms?”

  Maybe it’s because we’re talking about money and printed forms, but Jack is suddenly very coherent. “They don’t exist. You have to make one up.”

  “What does it have to say?”

  “I dunno. The kid’s name and address at the very least, and a couple of sentences about how he’s there at his own risk and with his parents’ consent. And you have to get one of his parents to sign it.”

  “I’ve got his name. No address, though.”

  “What is that kid’s name, anyway?” Jack asks. “He’s been at every game in the last two years. I always see him there, but there never seems to be anyone with him.”

  “His last name is the same as mine: Bathgate. Wonder if we’re related.”

  “Well,” Jack answers, his head sinking back on the pillow, “he’s got one hell of a mouth on him, so I wouldn’t be surprised.”

  I feel someone’s hand on my elbow. It’s Esther, waving the car keys at me. “Time we got out of here,” she says. “I’ll stop by and see you tomorrow, dear.”

  “Come and see me at my apartment,” Jack answers. “I’m not letting them hold me in here overnight. People die in hospitals. Ask Gord.”

  Esther stops me in the lobby. “Are you sure you’re all right?”

  I insist that I am. She puts her palm to my forehead, and frowns.

  “You’re too pale for my liking,” she says. “I’ll drive.”

  I don’t argue.

  SEVENTEEN

  GORD STAYS AT THE hospital with Jack — probably all night, knowing him — so Esther and I have only Wendel for a passenger on the way back to the Coliseum.

  We say our goodbyes — I’m half-convinced they’ll be last goodbyes — and let him out near the arena’s already-darkened front doors.

  “Are we in any hurry?” I say as we watch Wendel make his way to Esther’s truck.

  She flips the limo into drive. “No, not really. You have some- thing in mind?”

  “Let’s take the scenic route,” I say.

  She can’t help herself. “What scenic route?”

  I laugh despite myself, because she’s right. Less than twentyfour hours after the snowstorm ended, the usual combination of fly-ash from the sawmill burners and airborne sulphur from the pulp mills has fouled everything. Downtown Mantua already looks like someone pissed on it.

  She pushes the gearshift back to park, pumps the gas pedal, and waits. “Well?”

  “Turn off the car,” I tell her. “Let’s go inside for a moment.”

  “You don’t have a key,” she objects, sensibly not wanting to walk around to the back doors where the commercial leaguers come and go.

  “I’ve got Jack’s keys. There’s something in the lobby I have to show you.”

  “Have to?” she asks.

  “Want to,” I say, then amend it again. “Need to. You need to know this.”

  We walk to the door, and I slide Jack’s key into the lock. The genius who set up the photo display all those years ago thoughtfully rigged it so that the fluorescents inside the display cases are wired to the main door, and as the bolt swings back inside the key door the cases light up. Maybe he thought illuminating those immortals would help their custodians to remember to lock the door. Tonight, his small invention is going to help us perform a more serious act of memory.

  I enter the lobby and stop. Esther steps toward the bank of light switches on the wall.

  “No,” I say. “We don’t need any more light than we’ve got.”

  I guide her, my hand on her elbow, toward the display case nearest the doors, the one that has the team photo of the first Chilliwack Christian Lions champions in it. As we near it I feel her hesitate, but she doesn’t pull back. It takes me only a second to key in on Billy Menzies, even through the lime green, but as I catch sight of myself the way I was twenty-one years ago an alreadyfamiliar tightness grabs at my chest. I’d better get this out quickly. I may not have time to spare.

  I press my right index figure against the glass over Billy Menzies. “Do you know who that man is?”

  She begins to speak the name, but then hesitates again, stops. After a moment she clears her voice and speaks. “That’s Wendel’s father. His name is …”

  “His name is Billy Menzies.” One of the hot steel bolts slams through my lungs as I speak the name. “Now look at his face,” I wince, squeezing the words out as a second bolt rockets through me. “And then look at mine.”

  She doesn’t do what I ask. Instead, she looks into my eyes and sees the pain there, and loses all interest in what I’m trying to show her. As a third bolt sears through my chest cavity I double over, my face against her chest. I hear a sharp cry of distress escape her, feel her arms folding around me, and then, from everywhere, there is darkness coming at me, swift and aggressive. My last two thoughts are that it hurts like hell, and that I don’t want to go.

  BUT I WAKE UP, and things are pretty much where they were when I blinked out — the important things, anyway. Esther’s face about eighteen inches from mine. She’s pale and concerned, but oddly I can’t read any fear in her face. Nor, for that matter, any evidence to suggest that she’s figured out what I was trying to tell her before I keeled over.

  Beyond her, though, the scenery has changed completely. I’m lying on a hospital gurney, and white-clothed men and women are scurrying around the periphery of my vision. I recognize the hospital emergency room, and on my chest, as I look down, are a series of electrodes, taped down in an asymmetrical array. They disappear behind my head, where I assume there is a machine. There’s an IV stuck in my arm, also taped down, and around my waist a canvas restraining belt.

  “That was interesting,” I say, trying to sound cheerful.

  “I can think of several better ways to describe it,” Esther answers, dryly. “You scared the sweet Jesus out of me.”

  “What happened?”

  She gestures at the equipment behind me. “That’s what they’re trying to find out.”

  “How long?”

  “What do you mean, ‘how long’?” A familiar twinkle alters her concerned expression. “You’ve always told me it was nine inches.”

  I try to repress my own laughter, can’t, and am surprised that it doesn’t hurt. “No, I mean how long was I out?”

  She shrugs. “About an hour. Maybe more. You’ve been doing some very silly things since you got here.”

  A nurse enters, looking very stern, and motions Esther out of the way. The nurse fiddles at the electrodes, pulls a printout from the machine behind my head, and presses a button. I hear the machine whirring. She takes my pulse, frowning while she does it, then pulls the second printout from the machine.

  “Try to be still,” she says to me. To Esther she adds, “Try to keep him from moving around. The doctor will be here in a minute.”

  Esther moves back to my side, picks up my hand, and squeezes it gently. I try to think of something to say that will comfort her, but all that’s coming to mind is that I’d die for her. It’s true that I would, but judging from the way she’s looking at me — fondly — it isn’t what she has in mind.

  “I think it might have been a heart attack,” I admit. I don’t tell her about the one earlier, in
the dressing room.

  “That’s what I thought, too,” she replies, after a moment.

  “What do they think?”

  “You know how doctors and nurses are. They don’t think any- thing. They just run tests and write things on pieces of paper.”

  If she understands what I was trying to tell her about myself before I conked out, I can’t read it in her face, just like I can’t tell if she knows more about my condition than she’s letting on. She’s the picture of poker-playing calm, as usual.

  “I’ve got something I need to say to you, in case …”

  She cuts me off. “Not now. It can wait until you’re stabilized. I want you to calm down” — here she hesitates — “and stop acting like a baby.” She leans against the bed and rests the side of her face against my forearm. “Gord is going to be here in a minute, and he’ll get to the bottom of this.”

  “Don’t they know what it was?”

  “Apparently not,” she answers, peering back to examine the script coming off the machines behind my head. “Your EKGS are normal.”

  At least I did one thing properly. I had a will done last year, without telling Esther. It makes her my sole beneficiary, so if I kick she’ll get everything. That’s a comfort. And Wendel will get the use of my assets eventually, I suppose.

  I blurt it out. “Esther. I’m Billy Menzies.”

  “I know,” she says. She doesn’t move her head to look at me, and her voice is flat when she goes on. “I’ve known all along.”

  I feel a surge of emotion, somewhere between anger and disappointment. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I was waiting for you to tell me. I don’t know. I didn’t want you to feel burdened. Not by me or by Wendel.”

  “Don’t be crazy.”

  “I’m not,” she says with a hint of irritation in her voice. “Look at it from my point of view. At first it seemed wrong to drop it all in your lap. I mean, I didn’t know what kind of person you really were, and I didn’t know where you’d been. After that, I wasn’t sure if I loved you or even wanted to stay with you. So things dragged on. I got caught, that’s all. People don’t see everything, you know. And you kept your cards up pretty damned high.”