The Last of the Lumbermen Page 2

  Me? I’m Andrew William Bathgate, hockey player and minor industrial real estate magnate, a.k.a. hockey never-was and landswapping sleazeball. I was born right here in Mantua. Then I left town for a long time, which might be why — not counting last night’s whack on the noggin — I’m able to appreciate the otherworldly side of this place. I’m a homer and an alien at the same time, two men in one body in more ways than one. Gord says I’ve got a sixty-year-old head on a thirty-year-old body. He’s talking about my grey hair, but he’s right in other ways.

  I’d better tell you about Mantua. It’s a city of 80,000 people that a few decades ago was a much smaller town nestled around the junction of two rivers in Northern British Columbia. In the old days, Mantua had one industry — logging the forests and cutting them into spaghetti — and two kinds of recreation: making money and getting drunk. It isn’t much different today, except that it has a lot fewer trees to be logged and cut up, along with a new form of recreation: worrying about where the jobs are all going. Or, for those few citizens with extra brain cells and some perspective, worrying about the town’s future.

  Then there’s the Mantua Memorial Coliseum. Forget the grand name. It’s really just an ordinary arena that holds two-thousand-or-so people if it’s packed tight — which it never is. It got its fancy name when some local politician realized that Mantua was named after a city in Italy and decided that since Rome had a famous Coliseum, Mantua, Italy must have had one too — maybe a slightly less fabulous one, but a Coliseum either way. And since Mantua, B.C. is named after Mantua, Italy, it followed that we ought to have a Coliseum too.

  The “Memorial” part is a bit more complicated. Some claim it’s because it’s the second Coliseum built here. The first one was built in 1963, a couple of years after the original hockey arena, the plain old Mantua Civic Arena, collapsed and burned after a big snow. The folks in charge didn’t learn much from having the old arena collapse under a load of snow. The Coliseum they built to replace the Civic Arena survived just two winters before its roof collapsed after a snowstorm. Nothing very memorable took place in the two years the first Coliseum stood up to the elements, so damned if I can say what it is we’re supposed to be remembering with the Memorial tag on the third arena. Maybe it’s to remind the janitors to shovel the snow off the roof every once in a while.

  And no, neither the Memorial Coliseum nor the one it replaced resembles the one in Rome. The first Mantua Coliseum was like hundreds of other hockey arenas across the country. The Memorial Coliseum is identical except for the two large sets of steel girders cantilevered across the outside to keep its roof from collapsing.

  The steel girders were supposed to solve the snow problems, but they’ve been a mixed success. Every few years since the building opened there’ve been problems with the roof, including one time when a civic worker who was up there with a machine blowing the snow off fell through, machine and all, and broke both legs. I wasn’t in town for that one, but things being what they are in Mantua it’s even money he was up there with the Zamboni. Crazier things have happened.

  I played scrub hockey in the old Civic Arena every Saturday morning until I was eleven. It was a great old building, built completely of wood thirty or forty years before, and its natural ice may explain why I’m almost as good a swimmer as a skater. With the climate around Mantua — we’re either coming or going from a major blizzard or a major thaw — there were more than a few games where the skating rink looked more like a small lake.

  I have a more pleasant memory of the old arena’s steamy dress- ing rooms, with their pot-bellied wood stoves and unpainted benches, and of the scarred wooden walkways that led to the ice — when it was ice, that is. Except for the boards and a few signs, there wasn’t a spot of paint anywhere in that building, so it was like being inside a giant cabin. Oh, yeah. There’s one other memory I have of it: the day it collapsed.

  It was a Saturday, and it had been snowing for what seemed like weeks. I was supposed to play that morning, and I set off unsupervised and happy through the unploughed streets with my skates hanging on my stick, dressed up in the Montreal Canadiens uniform that had me permanently in trouble with my Toronto Maple Leafs-outfitted friends. But when I arrived, I found a block-long pile of splintered timbers, with a giant bonfire blazing away in the exact spot where I’d been going to suit up for hockey.

  The caretaker, I heard later, had just finished building a fire in the dressing room’s stove when he heard the building rafters begin to creak and groan. He only had time, the story goes, to rip the photographs of the Mantua Cup champions off the lobby walls and run out into the street before the building came down.

  As I stood there with my teammates watching the fire lick at the wreckage, it came to me that if the building had collapsed just an hour later I would have been one of about thirty-or-so seventyfive-pound potatoes roasting in the bonfire. The thought scared me so much I didn’t play hockey for three years. By then, my parents’ marriage had also collapsed, my mother had packed me up and moved south, and construction on the first Coliseum was nearly complete.

  THIS MORNING ESTHER SEEMS to be finding whatever Gord has to say particularly fascinating, and it frees me to look over the photographs of the Mantua Cup champions. I half-hear the end of the conversation with Gord, but then I tune out again and miss him leaving for the dressing room and Jack’s office. The next thing I know, Esther is standing behind me with her hand on my shoulder.

  “What’s up, Andy?” she asks. “Wondering who all those little green men were?”

  “Nope, I know them all,” I answer, more truthfully than she realizes. “Goofs like me. Only younger.”

  “You’re only as old as you decide to be,” she says.

  “Today my backside is telling me I’m about two hundred years old,” I tell her. “I guess that makes me old enough to be your greatgreat-grandfather, no?”

  That makes her laugh. It’s one of my biggest talents, actually, and an important one too, because Esther says she can’t resist a man who can make her laugh. She’s tall, red-haired — stacked, I guess you’d say if you were in a bar drinking beer and talking loose. For sure, she’s shapely for a woman in her forties. But she also has an unusual sort of distance to her, an aloofness, “poise” I think the word is. It isn’t the sort of thing guys around here are used to, and for her that’s part luck of the draw, part design. Since she works as a sex therapist, the only one in Mantua, a certain degree of aloofness is fairly important.

  Yeah, yeah, I know what you’re thinking. No. She doesn’t. She talks with her clients, usually couples, gives them advice and gets them to talk to one another with a bit of honesty. It’s a tough job, because most of them secretly hope she’s there to teach them how to have kinky sex.

  More than a few of her clients around town probably suspect I know more about their sex lives than I should. They’re correct. Esther happens to have a photographic memory, and she can repeat conversations she’s had days ago, word for word.

  “Andy,” she’s saying. “Earth calling Andrew Bathgate …”

  I shake myself loose from the cobwebs and turn to face her. “What?” I ask. “I was thinking about something.”

  “So tell me.”

  Here I have to lie to her. “I was thinking that you’re the only woman I’ve ever run across who has freckles on her butt.”

  She goes for it. “Oh, really? And just how large is your sample?”

  “Large enough,” I say.

  “There’s a surprise,” she answers, dryly. “Men who go around inspecting women’s behinds for freckles usually don’t get far — or live very long.”

  She is, for the record, the only woman I’ve ever seen with freckles on her butt. My lie was that this wasn’t exactly what I was thinking about. You see, I was thinking about what she’d do if she knew that I first saw those freckles while she was still a post-teen working the concession booth at th
e the last Mantua Cup tournament. And I was imagining what she’d say if I told her I was looking at my own face in two of those greeny-yellow photographs inside the glass display cases. Mantua never won its own cup, but I played on two cup winners. The last two. And I’m the reason there hasn’t been one since. For me, that’s the darkest thicket in the forest.

  THREE

  WENDEL IS AT THE Coliseum’s front doors. Wendel is Esther’s son, and one of my teammates. He’s twenty years old, tall, blond, and built like Superman. Whatever I may think of him personally, which is occasionally not very much, he’s the best hockey player Mantua has ever produced, and he’s pretty damned close to being the best player I’ve ever played with — or against.

  Wendel doesn’t have mixed feelings about me. It’s hard to say what he likes least: having to play hockey on the same team as me, or me living with his mother. He bangs open the big steel-andglass doors as if they’re made of balsa wood and tramps toward us.

  “Mom!” he hollers, as if he’s seeing her for the first time in a month. “I was hoping I’d find you here!”

  “What do you want?” she answers.

  “I need to borrow the pickup.”

  “Sorry, but I need it to drive Andy to physio.”

  Now that I’ve been identified as the official obstruction, he officially notices me. “Oh, hi, Andy,” he says. “Can’t handle the heavy traffic anymore?”

  “You saw Bellado bounce me off the boards last night,” I answer.

  Wendel is typically to-the-point. “Sure. Why don’t you retire? You were playing like you already had most of last night.”

  Esther cuts him off. “Andy can’t retire because your mother won’t let him. So put that in your pipe and smoke it, Mr. Smartypants.”

  “I don’t smoke,” he snaps. His voice is prim.

  Wendel doesn’t smoke. He doesn’t drink, either. He’ll gladly explain to you that it’s nothing personal, he just doesn’t have the time for petty vices. He’s the most serious young man I’ve ever run across, and that’s part of our mutual problem. When he’s not playing hockey, he’s busy with his tree-planting business or attending some ecology seminar or petitioning the government — or trying to get the broken-down Jeep Cherokee he refuses to get rid of fixed, and not just because he’s converted it to run on french fry oil he gets from a couple of the local restaurants.

  If you’ve deduced that Wendel is a little, well, different, you’re on. Around Mantua, it’s close to unanimous that Wendel is cracked. No one minds the entrepreneur stuff, and they don’t even mind his greenhead ideas. What gets them is that Wendel could be in New York playing for the Rangers, who drafted him in the first round eighteen months ago, and offered him a pile of money to sign.

  Wendel doesn’t wish to play in the NHL. He told them, and I quote, “I’ve got other priorities.” Like playing with a bunch of boneheads and duffers for the Mantua Mohawks? That’s right. He also wants to plant trees where nobody thinks they’ll grow, and he’s dedicated himself to driving every government in the country crazy with his demands and schemes. Not to mention his demands of me: leave my mother alone; stop skating like a porcupine; backcheck more; retire from hockey.

  Right now he wants Esther’s 4x4 to transport some panels of glass out to his greenhouses. He’s the only tree planter in the area with his own greenhouses, of course. Shortly after he turned down the Rangers he decided that if the seedlings used for local reforestation were grown locally they’d be better acclimatized, and the survival rates would be higher than the current lousy rates. Along with that — and this part I agree with — it would create employment locally. Sound like a pipe dream to you?

  It wasn’t. Easier than most people could borrow fifty bucks from their best friend, Wendel finagled three hundred grand from the government so he could mess around with his theory, along with a permit from the public utilities commission that forces one of the pulp mills — at their expense — to pump excess steam from their power plant to heat the greenhouses.

  The greenhouses are going up just fine. In fact, they’d be ahead of schedule except that the unemployed roofers he hired as builders suffer from perpetual hangovers, and keep dropping the glass they’re supposed to be installing.

  Wendel, here as with everything else, isn’t letting up. “Christ, Mom,” he whines, “Let the old fart take a cab or something. There’s probably nothing wrong with his back anyway.”

  Esther glances in my direction, her hand on her hip. I shrug, and turn back to the photographs. “Rent a truck,” she says, after a moment’s consideration. “I need the pickup for later.”

  “Can’t you go get his car?”

  “It doesn’t have four wheel drive.” That’s another of Esther’s quirks. She doesn’t like driving anything that doesn’t have four wheel drive.

  “Well, he can drive it, can’t he?”

  I see Esther’s resolve start to waver, so I toss my keys to him. “If you bring my car over here you can take the pickup.”

  He catches them easily, grimaces while I tell him where it is — a few blocks away — then yanks the pickup keys from Esther’s outstretched hand.

  “Park it in the usual spot and stick the keys on the hook under the bumper, will you?” I say. “And see if you can manage not to put any dents in it on the way over here.”

  He waves the handful of keys at me as he kicks open the Coliseum doors. “I’ll try real hard,” he answers, without looking back. “But there’s a lot of fire hydrants around here.”

  JUST LIKE ESTHER DOESN’T know I saw her freckles all those years ago, no one in Mantua knows I’m in those team photographs in the lobby. It isn’t that they’ve forgotten. They never knew. And no, it isn’t because the photos are so distorted that I’m unrecognizable. If all that was hiding me was a green face, they have been able to read my name in the list of players beneath the photos, right? But that’s the thing, see. I went by a different name then.

  Let’s start with Chilliwack and its Christian Lions.

  Chilliwack is a town in southern B.C., in those days about the same size as Mantua. But where Mantua has always been loaded to the rafters with logging equipment, sawdust burners, and drunk loggers, Chilliwack was heavy on car dealerships, skating rinks with sturdy rooves, dairy farmers, and evangelical churches. While I lived there, there were so many Bibles being thumped on Sunday morning that it sounded like jungle drums. But since this is Canada, they also play hockey in Chilliwack, and one year someone got the idea that Chilliwack should send a team of nice Christian boys like me to win the Mantua Cup.

  While we were winning our first Cup for Jesus a few of us slipped seriously south of the path of righteousness, doing our share of drinking, bar-fighting, and carrying on. When we returned home to Chilliwack, several ministers — friends of the Car Dealers Association that sponsored us — decided that too many native sons had come back with beer stains on their Bibles, and the next year they tried to stop us from going back.

  If we hadn’t had the argument that we needed to defend the Cup we’d won — and the commercial honour of Chilliwack’s car dealers — the pious ministers might have had their way and the world — my world — would be quite different. As it was, each one of us had to make solemn promises not to drink or fight or chase around before they’d send us off to win a second championship for the Lord. We made the promises, but once again we didn’t give Jesus anywhere near as much attention as we did hockey and Molson Canadian. And because of that, my name is Andy Bathgate and I live in Mantua.

  Back then I was called Billy Menzies. A couple of years after my parents divorced and my mother and I left Mantua, my mother married a man named Fred Menzies, a good Chilliwack Biblethumping car dealer and one of the Chilliwack Christian Lions’ sponsors. Fred Menzies insisted on adopting me, and, under pressure from my mother to help her rebuild the family, I went along with it. According to her, my real father was
spending his time and energy staring down the neck of an open whiskey bottle, and since he hadn’t shown up to raise any objection to my being adopted, why should I? A little while after the adoption went through, Menzies insisted I use my second name, William. That got shortened to Billy, because you can’t play hockey — even in Chilliwack — with a name like William.

  I didn’t much like old Fred, but at least he was there. And once I got over myself, I took to being Billy Menzies like a duck to water. Billy Menzies — at the beginning, anyway — was kind of admirable: quiet, self-confident, and even studious.

  As a beginner in hockey, Andrew Bathgate had been a defenceman who didn’t score much, took too many penalties, and made most of his stops by crunching other kids into the boards. But as Billy Menzies, comforted by the rock-solid arenas that never saw more than a dusting of snow, and after being sent off by Fred to Vancouver for power-skating lessons, my game improved. I was quick and smart, and the coaches said I was born with soft hands. I even grew a little pious.

  As Billy Menzies I was good enough to be a star in Junior B when I was seventeen. Probably I didn’t have the wheels to play higher than that — but I didn’t have the ambition either. When I wasn’t drafted, I let old Fred send me to Bible college in Oregon, which I didn’t have much ambition for either. I skipped as many of the Bible classes and church services as I could get away with, got high marks in the business courses, played some baseball, and chased after the Bible college girls.

  The girls were okay, I suppose, but they ran to type. They had names like Lynette and Tracy, and they all looked the same to me: thin, fine blond hair, pale complexions, and angular faces and flabby bodies that instinct told me would go to seed on them by the time they were halfway through their twenties. They were trailer-park princesses, no-brainers, Christian baby factories. If I didn’t know much else, I knew better than to settle for that.