The Last of the Lumbermen Read online

  “You really think an independent scaling yard has a chance?” It’s more a comment than a question.

  “Hard to say,” I admit. “Probably not, unless a lot of people change their minds about some fairly basic things. But I agree with what they’re trying to do. That Equivalent Value idea of his makes sense to me.”

  “It does to me too, but right now the world’s going in the opposite direction.”

  “Yeah, well, I guess I’m tired of sitting back on my ass watch- ing the big dogs eating the little dogs. All this bullshit about survival of the fittest doesn’t do it for me, you know? So I figure I ought to stand behind a few things that do.”

  “What does it for you, then?”

  “Wendel does, when he’s not annoying the crap out of me. A few of those people he’s been working with are trying to make things better. At least they care about how the things around us get misused. Seems to me that if we’re going to run around being impressed by people taking on difficult things, we ought to be more impressed by those kinds of things and not by all these jerks who’ll chew off a rat’s ass if they think they can make a profit from it.”

  I’m a little taken aback by my own passion, and Esther sees it. “Well, it’s good that you’re willing to help. And Wendel was pretty impressed by what you did. He’s coming over for dinner, incidentally.”

  No surprise there. He’s as fond of shepherd’s pie as I am. He appears at the back door ninety seconds before the dish comes out of the oven.

  “Hi, Andy,” he says coolly, tossing his mackinaw onto a chair in the dining room. “Thanks for the push this afternoon. Dunno if there’s enough testicles out there to take you up on that goofy offer you made, but it was fun watching them squirm.”

  “Offer’s real,” I say. “No time limit. It’d be nice if something changes around here.”

  “Man, am I hungry,” he says, smacking his hands together and sitting down. “Let’s eat.”

  OVER THE SHEPHERD’S PIE I relate my efforts to talk Junior into a goalie mask, together with the unexpected punchline Don Sr. provided.

  “Now all we need to do is get him to lose twenty-five pounds,” Wendel says, “and we’re set.”

  “Set for what?”

  “For the tournament.”

  That’s close to the last thing I want to talk about, so I pull first-things-first on him and mention that I’m going to drive down to Camelot tomorrow to see if I can talk Artie Newman into playing for us.

  “Good luck with that,” Esther says. “But you’re two players short, remember? Not one.”

  “Hey,” Wendel interrupts. “I had a thought. How about we pick up Freddy Quaw?”

  “Freddy Quaw?” Esther asks, just as I’m about to. I must know several dozen Quaws — it’s the family name for of the local native band’s hereditary chiefs. Esther probably knows at least fifty Quaws, but not, I guess, all of them.

  “He any relation to Roddy?” I ask. Roddy Quaw played for the Mohawks a few years back until the effects of a long string of “minor” logging accidents caught up with him. Nice guy, and from what Gord said about him a more than decent player in his day. Now he’s running the band council, which recently asked for downtown Mantua as part of their land claim. No one took them very seriously until they started camping on the lawn in front of city hall and it took a federal cabinet minister and a couple million dollars to get them off. Seems the railroad that originally designed the town site didn’t file some papers in the right filing tray back at the turn of the century, and there’s an outside chance the whole town is aboriginal land. I suppose we could just give the place back to them, but Jesus, I thought we were supposed to stop screwing them.

  “I think Freddy is Roddy’s nephew,” Wendel says. “The family sent him to Sault Ste. Marie to play hockey when he was fourteen, but he stoked some referee just before Christmas and they suspended him for the year. He’s eighteen this year, so he’s eligible for Senior.”

  “Do we want him if he’s just a goon?”

  Wendel shrugged. “The couple of times I played against him it looked like he had good skills. You know they try to turn every big kid into a goon in Junior. We could just tell him to play his own game, and see what happens.”

  “Well, see if you can get him out to the practice tomorrow. It’s pretty hard to say how things will go with Artie Newman. He’s a long shot. For all I know he’s had his head stuck inside a beer keg so long his brain has dissolved.”

  “You may not be able to tell him from a beer keg by now,” Esther says.

  “That’s entirely possible, too,” I admit. “But I figure he’s worth a look. Jack’s gone for the year, and I can’t play for three or four weeks. And we’ve been under the player limit all year anyway.”

  I’M ON THE HIGHWAY rolling south to Camelot by nine the next morning. The cold snap that started Saturday night is holding, and the temperatures are hovering just above minus twenty. That’s Fahrenheit, incidentally. Like most people around here, I never quite converted to Centigrade when Pierre Trudeau decided it would be entertainingly anti-American if the country went metric.

  Whatever the temperature is, it’s cold enough to make the snow crisp and tight under the Lincoln’s tires, and soon I’m cruising at one hundred thirty-five kph. I’d like to be cruising at eighty to eighty-five miles per hour, but the Lincoln’s speedometer doesn’t convert. I really don’t know how fast one-thirty-five kph is, except that it seems fast enough. I’ve traveled this route so many times I could drive it in my sleep.

  In just over an hour I’m at the outskirts of Camelot, with the stink of sulphur dioxide in my nostrils. The town has just a single pulp mill to Mantua’s three, but the Camelot mill’s technology — and maybe its location on the north edge of town — makes it smell stinkier.

  All I’ve got is a phone number for Artie Newman. When I phoned the number last night to warn him I was coming, I got a machine telling me gruffly to “leave a message, maybe we’ll call you back.” Hence, my itinerary this morning has a prior stop at the Camelot Ritz Grill. The easiest way of finding out anything in Camelot is to talk to Lenny Nakamoto, who makes it his business to know everybody and everything that’s going on in town. He’ll know exactly how to find Artie. The trick is to get him to tell me.

  I haven’t warned Lenny that I’m coming, but he’ll be where he always is in the morning: sitting at the table next to the cash register at the Grill, counting the previous night’s bar receipts. He’s a man of habit, Lenny Nakamoto. He’ll have the book- keeping done by a few minutes before ten, so that he can be the bank’s first customer when it opens. From there he’ll head back to the Grill for breakfast, which he will luxuriate over until tenforty-five, when he’ll retreat to the bar for its opening at eleven.

  I arrive just as he’s about to wolf down the first of the four rubbery fried eggs on the plate in front of him. He sees me coming, grins, and motions me to sit down. I slip into the booth across from him, tipping my wrist down to signal the waitress for coffee. It’s about the only thing on this menu I can stomach, but I’m not going to insult Lenny by telling him that no one in their right mind would eat in his restaurant. I need his good will.

  Let me tell you just one story about the Camelot Ritz Grill. Sane and sober folks don’t eat there much, but in Camelot, always a little short on sane and sober, that isn’t a problem. The drunks at the Camelot Ritz Hotel bar think the Grill is the best place in the universe, particularly after Lenny boots their asses out of the bar and tells them to sober up.

  They stumble down the hallway to the Grill, where they drink a coffee or two — and then order beer by the bottle. It’s great for the drunks, who can sober up and get drunker without leaving the building.

  It hasn’t been so great for the Grill’s decor. Every few months, things get out of hand and the place gets trashed. Old Man Ratsloff gets around to renovating the place every
five years or so, but because he’s a cheapskate he never spends enough to make it look decent. The last time the café got trashed he gave the renovation job to JoMo, who’d just bought a router and was into English Tudor and wormwood. He got hold of a bunch of unplaned fir four-by-fours and three-by-sixes, chewed wormy grooves along them with his router, and stained them as dark as he could. Then he slapped them over the old arborite surfaces from the last renovation. To make things worse, JoMo found a couple bolts of purple-and-puke-coloured naugahyde at some liquidation sale in Vancouver and used it to redo the cushions. The place looks like it was decorated by Henry VIII while he was on LSD.

  Lenny sees me eyeing the decor while the waitress puts a brown mug of coffee in front of me. “It’s not so bad,” he shrugs. “Hides the bloodstains. What brings you to our fair city this morning?”

  “I need to find Artie Newman.”

  Lenny’s guard goes up. “Why the fuck do you want to find him?”

  “His old man’s real sick,” I say. It’s true, sort of. Alpo is a sick puppy. “Somebody has to tell Artie.”

  Lenny peers at me skeptically. “Oh yeah? Why didn’t you just phone him?”

  “I did. All I got was a machine. Anyway, that isn’t the kind of news you should put on an answering machine.”

  “Sure,” he says. “I believe you. Tell me you’re not trying to sign him to a hockey contract to replace old Jackie-boy.”

  I try to keep my face straight, but Lenny reads me anyway. Then, unexpectedly his expression softens, and he reaches for a small black book that’s half-hidden under a manila envelope beside him. He flips it open and passes it across the table with his index finger pressed over a written address.

  “What do I get for this?” he wants to know.

  “It’s what you won’t get.”

  “Like what won’t I get?”

  “Well,” I say, “you won’t get Gord building a nest in your goal crease this Sunday.”

  He lifts his finger off the address. “Fair enough. You got a pen?”

  I hand him my pen. While he’s scribbling the address on a napkin, I ask him some questions about Artie Newman.

  “He’s been in town for a couple of years now,” Lenny says, slipping the pen into his shirt pocket. “Shacked up with a woman I heard he’s been chasing around since he was about fourteen. She’s some kind of woman, too.”

  “I’m more interested in what kind of shape he’s in.”

  “Well, he’s dry, if that’s what you mean. I never see him around here. To tell you the truth, the Old Man’s been trying to sign him to play with us since he arrived. No deal. But he’s been running the Zamboni on the weekends, actually.”

  “What’s he do the rest of the time?”

  “I dunno. He and his woman — her name’s Elsa, incidentally, and you’d better mind your Ps and Qs around her — they keep pretty much to themselves. I think he’s got some sort of U.I. pension, and all he does is work on a couple cars he’s got out there. He’s a strange duck.”

  “Think he can play, still?”

  “It’s strictly a question of whether or not he wants to,” Lenny says, scratching his head. “There ain’t no physical problem. I seen him skate. I went down to the arena after the bar closed — shit, now, it must have been a month ago — and there’s Artie out on the ice by himself, full equipment, with a bucket of pucks. So yeah, he’s still got it. But getting him to use it ain’t going to be easy.”

  I finish my coffee while we chat about other things, then pull a couple of loonies from my pocket and tuck them under the saucer. I’m about to slip the napkin with Artie’s address into my shirt pocket and vamoose when it occurs to me that Lenny will probably know something about Ron Bathgate.

  “What do you know,” I ask him, “about a guy named Ron Bathgate?”

  Lenny looks up sharply. “Ron Bathgate? He any relation?”

  “Distant,” I say. It’s true, sort of. Until yesterday I thought he was on the other side of eternity.

  “Makes sense,” Lenny says, with a snigger. “He’s a strange potato, that one.”

  “How so?”

  “Well, how many guys do you know who’ve had the balls to tell InterCon to go screw themselves. Cost him his mill, I heard. People said he must have thought he had some aces up his sleeve that weren’t there when whatever game he was playing got hot, but I never believed that.”

  “Tell me more.”

  “Oh, Christ, Weaver. I can’t recall the details, except that he was into the same sort of ecology nonsense your old lady’s kid is. I’m sure the two of them are pumping it in both your ears these days. Anyway, I heard Bathgate’s living up in your neck of the woods now. Why don’t you ask him about it yourself?”

  I get to my feet. “I guess I’ll have to,” I say. “Thanks for the address.”

  “You just keep that walking side of beef out of my crease like you promised.”

  “Okay. But watch for me when I come off the DL. Just for laughs, of course.”

  “At your own risk, Tinkerbell,” Lenny says without looking up. “Catch you later.”

  TWENTY-FIVE

  THE CAMELOT RIVER JOINS the Fraser just below the bridge over to West Camelot, but it doesn’t do it the way the Fraser meets the Nechalko River at Mantua. A few hundred years ago Mantua was the two rivers most of the year, and when it wasn’t it was a field of washed gravel, dotted by islands of cottonwood crosscut by oxbows and stinking sloughs where the two river streams flooded across one another. Back then, the rivers at Mantua were equal streams, except that Fraser was a muddy brown and Nechalko was clear and blue. Then we dammed the Nechalko and started dumping mountains of shit and debris into it, so that now it’s silver-green and half the size it once was.

  The way the two rivers behaved was a little like life was around these parts. They ran over one another, sprayed gravel and muck into one another’s faces, and didn’t apologize for the messes they left behind. I suppose the way they are now, come to think of it, is also about right. One half making the same old mess, and the other half sucking up toxins.

  The smaller, sedate Camelot river isn’t much like either of Mantua’s rivers — or like life. It leaves its orderly cottonwoodlined banks sparkling blue, sidles politely into the murky Fraser, and, within a quarter kilometre, vanishes. I suppose that’s how the city of Camelot got its name — its river is an English gentleman, out of place in a land of ass-kicking, over-the-banks, debris- littered rivers and creeks.

  Not that anyone in Camelot has ever taken a cue from the river. In all the bad ways, the town is more like Mantua than Mantua itself is: stinkier and with more fights-per-hour in the bars. As many broken beer bottles and wrecked cars litter the banks of the Camelot river as anywhere in Northern B.C.

  The address Lenny gave me is on the west side of the Fraser, and as I cross the bridge I realize Artie must be living in the nest of low hills across from the mouth of the Camelot. If anyone in Camelot had any brains it would be the town’s choicest real estate, but the area filled up with squatters’ shacks forty years ago, and the only improvements since the land got subdivided have been the trailers people haul in to replace the shacks that burn down.

  Artie’s place isn’t difficult to find. It’s a rambling shed-like building set at the base of one of the hills. The best thing about the place is the mint late-’50s Mercedes convertible tucked inside a lean-to a few feet from the house. It’s a 190 SL from the look of it, a pretty fabulous moment in automotive history.

  The house, on the other hand, is somewhat less than mint, and not fabulous at all. It was probably built originally to store heavy equipment, and the conversion to living quarters has been fairly recent and half-baked. Still, the worst thing about it is that it appears to be deserted. I pound hard a couple of times on the most likely entrance, a tall, windowless side door, and while I’m waiting I look around. No em
pty beer cases — a good sign. Other than that, there’s a trail in the snow leading to the lean-to and car, and another that leads into a thicket towards the rear and the hill.

  I’m about to go back to the Lincoln when a buzzy speaker I haven’t noticed crackles to life above the door. “Up here,” a male voice tells me. “Up the hill. Just follow the path.”

  It takes me some effort to struggle up the snow-packed path with my chest and back both giving me the gears, but at the top I discover another, larger building that wasn’t visible from the road. Standing outside its entrance is, I assume, Artie Newman. I introduce myself, and am a little surprised that Artie isn’t surprised that I’m there. He invites me inside for coffee.

  Inside the building are four more elderly Mercedes. One is another 190, this one a sedan rusted as far as those cars do rust, and ravaged for parts. There’s also a decent-looking mid-‘60s 220 sedan, much more massive than the 190, and a pair of fabulous older models I can’t identify. There’s also a woman in her late twenties or early thirties, blond and elegant-looking despite the grease-stained mechanic’s coveralls she’s wearing.

  Artie himself looks far more Scandinavian than his father. He’s roughly six feet, well-built but fine-featured, and with a thatch of thinning, nearly white-blond hair.

  “This is my wife, Elsa,” he says. “Andy Bathgate, from the Mohawks.”

  “Thought we might be seeing you,” she says, stepping forward to shake my hand.

  “Elsa helps run the bar for Lenny weeknights,” Artie says, by way of explanation. “You take cream in your coffee?”

  “Black, thanks. I gather you know why I’m here.”

  “I have an idea,” he says, his face suddenly serious. “But I’m not sure I can help you.”

  I present my case. The further I get into it, the less attractive it sounds, even to me — and the more I want to make it sound attractive. Just on appearance Artie’s about two grades above my best hopes for him. He’s clearly sober and in shape, and that’s very good. And he’s no nitwit. The downside is that he’s got a life here, and it’s hard to see why he’d want to disrupt it to play hockey in a fifth-rate league with a bunch of vicious kids, psycho wannabes, and broken-down veterans like me.