The Last of the Lumbermen Page 21

  Gord hoots in the background.

  “No, I mean, you’re my home.”

  “Sensible,” she says, after a moment of thought. “Yes. Of course, I’ll marry you. But you have to be standing on your own two feet. I’m getting sick of these deathbed scenes of yours. I don’t want them to become a habit.”

  PART THREE

  THIRTY-ONE

  SEVEN WEEKS LATER, THINGS are back to normal around here — although normal isn’t what it used to be. I’m just about to suit up for my first practice since the run-in with the bear when Esther sticks her head inside the dressing room door.

  “I need about five of you guys out here,” she says. “Not includ- ing you, Andy.”

  The seven or eight of us who don’t have our skates on yet troop to the door, Wendel among them. She motions them down the hallway and steps inside.

  I put one of my skates on, stand up, and then sit down to lace it up. She sits down beside me. She’s holding something behind her back.

  “What you got there, sweetheart?” I ask.

  She hands me a new helmet, a bulky white Bauer.

  Jack’s making smart remarks before I can even get the damned thing on. “What’s he supposed to do with that? Go deep sea diving?”

  “Maybe,” Esther answers. “He looks like a pinhead with the old one, and it isn’t safe.”

  “Well, better get him a flak jacket. His head’s so full of rocks you could whack him across the side of the head with a sledgehammer and not hurt anything.”

  Esther doesn’t miss a beat. “Try the helmet on, Andy,” she says. “I’ll get you the flak jacket later.”

  I don’t get the chance to argue because the helmet isn’t all she’s brought. Her bearers are returning from safari carrying large cardboard boxes. Wendel rips into the box he’s carrying, and pulls out a pair of forest green hockey pants. “Cool,” he says. “Let’s see the jerseys.”

  Our new uniforms have arrived just in time for the tournament.

  A FEW THINGS HAVE happened.

  One of them is that the Mantua Mohawks are no more. No, we didn’t disband. For the first time in decades there hasn’t been a reason to. We didn’t lose a single game while I was on the DL. We’ve made second place, six points behind the Roosters with two games left, one in Okenoke and the other in Wilson Lake. But a week ago some yahoos broke into the Wilson Lake arena and started a fire in the concession booth. The fire spread, turning the arena’s north side into a write-off, including the ice-making equipment. The facility is out for the year, and there’s talk of tearing it down and starting from scratch.

  That touched off a whole set of consequences. The Stingers were in last place, and with their arena gone, an arson investigation underway, and charges pending against the coach’s son for being one of the yahoos, the team decided it wanted to opt out of the playoffs. Jack and I drove down to Camelot for a league meeting, and we all agreed to cancel the playoffs. We wanted to play but Wilson Lake didn’t, Blacky Silver from Okenoke agreed with them, and Old Man Ratsloff said he didn’t care one way or the other. It wasn’t like he’d gone yellow. More like he’d made a decision about where the Roosters would have a better shot at beating us — in a five-game playoff in a dead league or in a possible one-gamer in a tournament.

  The Mantua Memorial Tournament has grown up from Wendel and Esther’s Saturday night pipe dream. Co-sponsored by Wally Weimer’s Northern Sports and the Native Band, it’s going to be four days of hockey, fun, and mayhem starting Thursday night March 29th and ending Sunday afternoon April Fools’ Day. Twelve teams are coming in from as far off as Saskatchewan and Idaho. One of them is the Chilliwack Lions.

  Once we made the decision to go ahead with a tournament, getting teams to play was easy: a half-dozen phone calls, and five days later we were turning them away. I guess Senior tournaments are like the Senior leagues: more players and teams left than leagues and tournaments.

  Teams kept calling in weeks after, and some of the teams that wanted in got pretty damned strange with their offers. Jack got bribes, threats, and a couple of propositions he won’t talk about. The strangest one was from a team of musicians from Vancouver, who offered to play music wherever we wanted if we’d let them into the tournament — sort of like a tournament orchestra. I think Jack was tempted by that one. They sounded like fun.

  It helped that we made the economics attractive. Entry fee of five hundred dollars a team, tournament prize of ten thousand dollars, with five thousand for placing second, twenty-five hundred for third. We got a big chunk of the prize money from the Native Band, who I think put it up as much to tweak Garvin Snell’s nose as anything else. Snell unwittingly set himself up for the tweaking. He got his nose up around the middle of his forehead the first moment he got wind that a tournament was in the offing, and after Jack approached him for financial support it went higher yet.

  When Wally surprised us by kicking in three grand without being asked, it was clear that the tournament was going to fly. City Hall might want to ignore it but they weren’t going to stop it from happening. Gord and Jack coughed up a cheque each for one thousand dollars, and I gave Esther my cheque for the same amount. I’m allowed to change my mind, aren’t I?

  There was one other complication that made everyone happy by the time it was worked out. The Native Band made their support conditional on us changing the name of the team: no more Chief Wahoo on the jerseys, no more Mohawks. Only a moron would have missed that one winging its way toward us. It was coming from within the team anyway, with Jack being encouraged by Freddy Quaw’s creative defacing of Chief Wahoo.

  Mucking around with Chief Wahoo was contagious. By the time we were five games into the winning streak, nearly everyone had been messing with him. Most just imitated what Freddy’d done, but a couple of guys, no doubt egged on by Gus Tolenti, whited Wahoo out completely. Bobby Bell got a black pen and extended the chief’s nose so it reached around to the back of the sweater, and Junior used the same pen to blacken half of Wahoo’s teeth. Anyway, last week we held a team meeting after Jack and I came back from cancelling the playoffs, and we made it official. The Mantua Mohawks are dead, long live the Mantua Lumbermen.

  That’s when I discovered what Esther was doing at Wally’s the day I picked up Junior’s mask: she’d been ordering new uniforms for the team. She saw it coming before anyone. She’d ordered the uniforms without crests, but when she talked to the Native Band about sponsoring the tournament and caught wind that they weren’t very happy with the Wahoo crests, she got Freddy to design a new one with the only name that made sense. It’s a beaut, like the new uniforms: green on white, with “Lumbermen” on an ascending diagonal over a healthy but slightly squat spruce tree.

  In an ideal universe I suppose we’d have all sat down around a table and voted on the new name and uniforms — in which case the uniforms would have arrived around the year 2050. Sometimes you have to cut across a few people’s lawns to get where you have to go. I’m glad Esther had the sense to do it for us even if it cost her four grand.

  What else? Well, as you can see, Jack is back, smart mouthed as ever. His playing days are over, and even now that the heavy cast is off his knee his idea of rehab is high-speed gymnastics on his crutches and a lot of hop skip and jump manoeuvres when he loses track of where the crutches are. He’s aware of what I discovered when I packed that bag for him, but without us having to come right out and talk about it we let each other know nothing’s changed. Anyway, what was there to say about what’s really just another secret that’s breaking down, outliving its usefulness. While we were co-coaching we amused ourselves with some cheesy jokes about limp-wrist shots and come-frombehind victories that nobody else except maybe Gus and Gord could make heads or tails of. Nothing new there, either. About the only change is that he and Gord are uncles to a slightly larger family than they had before. They don’t seem unhappy about the New World Order.


  Bozo is back to normal, or almost. The vet says she’ll likely end up with some arthritis when she’s older, but the hip has mended fine, the wounds are closed, and her immune system seems to have relaxed. Come summer, she’s going to have company. Esther and Claire are cooking up a scheme to start breeding dogs, and Esther has ordered a pair of pedigree Newfoundland pups from a breeder north of Edmonton.

  THERE WERE JUST TWO objections to the new uniforms when Esther showed us the colour scheme and the crest design. Gus wanted to know if “Lumbermen” shouldn’t maybe be “Lumberpersons.” That got him guffaws and some advice about what would happen to his “lumberpersons” if they showed their prissy cans at the bars.

  “C’mon Gus,” Jack said when the laughter died back enough for anyone to be heard. “Tell us what you really want the team to be called.”

  “How about The Mantua Seedlings.”

  “We’re a little old for that, aren’t we?” I asked.

  “Speak for yourself, white-hair.”

  The only other criticism was mine. I wanted to know if maybe the ascending diagonal on the crest shouldn’t have been descending, given the state of the industry. That got me a wise- ass grin from Wendel, and more laughs from the others.

  Now that the new duds are here, I have to say that Wally did a fabulous job putting them together. The jerseys are named and numbered without mistakes, and the materials are first class. We’re going to be so pretty when we hit the ice in these duds people are going to swoon.

  Yeah, sure, we’re still a Senior hockey team from a league that might not see another season. But in our different ways, we all feel like we’ve earned the right to be gorgeous and good for a few weeks. Me, Jack, Gord, Junior, and one or two others for having hung in as long as we have, some of the others for having played as well as they have in the last while.

  For Artie, for instance, it’s been pure pleasure, and you can see it written all over him. Never mind that Alpo still hasn’t acknowledged him, or that his wife probably isn’t pleased that her husband is spending so much of his time in Mantua. He’s a player, and there’s no one in the league outside of Wendel who’s better. Alpo is dead wrong about his son. He’s no pisstank washout, no traitor to his family and ethnic heritage. Artie Newman has grown up, and he’s a better man than his father. Alpo gets smaller each day he refuses to see it.

  Artie wasn’t the only one who grew in my estimation over those seven weeks. Junior is finally earning his status as starting goalie. For a guy thirty pounds overweight, he’s always had surprising reflexes. But with everyone in the league shooting for his head, all anyone saw of his reflexes was how good he was at ducking pucks, falling on his face, and avoiding stitches and sutures. I mostly saw the puck hitting the twine behind him. I missed the talent he’d used up keeping it from hitting him in the face.

  The mask made him utterly fearless. For a few games, he seemed to want to stop as many shots with the mask as with the stick or blocker. I don’t think he’d ever had so much fun in his entire life. But once the shooters around the league realized he wasn’t ducking they stopped head-hunting, and the real test of his skills took over. Junior passed that, screeching with derision as a shot from the blueline bounced harmless off his chest and into his glove, howling with glee as he sprawled along the goal crease to kick a deflection into the stands. The crease became his hunting preserve, and he laid the lumber to anyone who got too comfortable inside it.

  He makes mistakes, sure. He got caught wandering from the crease a couple of times, and the first brawl with the Roosters he stormed down the ice to dance with Lenny and got thrashed.

  But it’s true what they say: winning works. A whole generation of lousy Mohawks got dragged up to the level that Wendel and Artie play at. Dickie Pollard, who’d gotten onto the team a few years back because he was Bobby Bell’s best friend, and had spent as much time sitting on the bench as Jack could manage, suddenly turned into our best defenceman. Winning helped his confidence, but what helped more was a conversation between five or six of us after Dickie had left one of the practices. Jack and I were talking about how to improve our still-porous defense for the tournament, and it didn’t take long for Dickie’s chronically rotten play to come up.

  “Dickie’s hopeless,” I said, “but what can we do? He won’t hit anybody, and every time someone comes near him he gives away the puck.”

  “It isn’t him,” Wendel interrupted. “Haven’t you ever noticed that he’s pretty decent in practice and when we’re on the road?”

  “So what if he’s Bobby Orr in practice?” I snorted. “He turns into a gerbil when there’s anything on the line.”

  “Well, next time he’s on the ice, check out the old bag sitting just above the penalty box.”

  “Oh yeah. I’ve seen her,” I said. “That woman’s really something. Didn’t they toss her out of the Coliseum last year for whacking JoMo Ratsloff with her purse while he was in the penalty box?”

  “That’s the one,” Wendel said. “Dickie’s mother. She’s been riding him ever since he was in Peewee. He can’t play when she’s around. He takes one look at her and his spine goes Jell-O.”

  “Nothing we can do about that,” Jack said. “We can’t exactly ban her from the games.”

  Freddy, who’d been listening in on the conversation, had a suggestion. “We could have somebody sit next to her and have them point out the error of her ways next time she gets out of hand.”

  “Like who?” Jack asked. “Jack the Ripper?”

  “How about my sister?”

  “Who’s your sister?”

  “Frieda Lane.”

  “Frieda Lane is your sister?” I said. “Holy shit. That’s really something.”

  What it is is really funny. Every bureaucrat in North Central B.C. is terrified of Frieda Lane. Frieda has a law degree, and she’s been the motor behind the Band’s attempt to reclaim downtown Mantua. She’s supposed to have a mean streak a mile wide, but the several times I’ve run into her she’s been decent enough. If genetics run true, she’ll have the right sense of humour for what we need.

  “Why don’t you talk to her?” someone suggested.

  Freddy laughed. “Consider it done.”

  It got done. I don’t know what Frieda said to the old bag, but it must have been good. Dickie’s mother stopped showing up for the games, and Dickie’s play improved, night to blinding bloody sunlight.

  BUT ALL THE NEWS isn’t good. We might not get to wear our beautiful uniforms next year. A four-team Senior league can cruise along out of sheer habit, but a league with just three teams is too small to survive. Personally, I can’t see any way there’ll be a functioning arena in Wilson Lake by next fall. And anyway, for leagues like the NSHL, the writing has been on the wall for a long time. Senior hockey is in trouble just about everywhere. It’s mostly television, I guess. It kills local local sports like it does everything else.

  Back in the glory days, when the leagues were the main action in town and the players really were semi-pros, the community got them good jobs and other perks to stay around for. That’s why the Penticton Vees or the Trail Smoke Eaters could win the World Championships and not have their players ripped off by the NHL. They were better players and better teams than we’ve got now, and the towns they came from loved them better. Those days are long, long gone, and they aren’t about to come back. Not even if the Mantua Lumbermen play their games in the most beautiful uniforms in hockey history.

  Garvin Snell, meanwhile, is a man in touch with his time, even if he spends most of his energy licking its boots. A Major Junior franchise in Victoria is up for grabs, and, not more than a week after the Native Band helped us bully him into giving the permits for the tournament, Snell phoned Jack to say he was putting together a consortium to transfer the Victoria Junior A team up here. He also told Jack that he’ll be calling for proposals to build a five-thousand-seat arena in Ma
ntua, in which case the Mohawks should starting looking around for new digs. Hard to say whether or not he’s just yanking our chain. If he’s serious, the corporate sponsors will line up to support him. Maybe I’ll support him, too. Maybe our time is over and we ought to pack it in.

  Maybe, maybe. But not quite yet. There’s the Mantua Memorial Tournament in a few days, and the Mantua Lumbermen, the beautiful green-and-white Lumbermen, will get one last shot at winning the Mantua Cup.

  THIRTY-TWO

  I’D BET MONEY THE Enola Gay would still be revving its engines on the runway and the scientists would still be in the labs scratching their heads if building the A-bomb had been as complicated as delivering a double knockout hockey tournament draw. An exaggeration? Maybe. But one part of the Bomb builders’ job was dead easy. They weren’t trying to be fair to everyone.

  Okay, bad joke all round. But I swear, making a double knockout hockey tournament look — and be — fair to everyone involved is A-bomb-level complicated. First, the double knockout part isn’t optional. No team deserves to travel five hundred miles, pay a five-hundred-dollar entry fee, and then get sent home after a single game. Second, you have to set up the draw so the weak teams feel like they’ve really had a shot. That’s not as easy as it sounds, because while you’re stroking the weakies you can’t let the good teams beat each other’s brains out in the first games, either. The fans have rights, too.

  The tournament object, naturally, is to get the two best teams into the final. But you can’t get them there by screwing around with the rest. Still not convinced about how complicated this is? Remember that you’re dealing with muscular men, and occasionally they show up with small brains. Their managers and coaches, this being the modern age, have learned to whine about their rights with the best of them.

  In the end, Jack came up with a draw that was fair enough that no one could challenge it, and which let nature take its course as far as that’s possible: we’re placing teams in the draw according to when they arrive in town. That may not sound like Darwin’s version of natural selection, but the parallels are there. Jack realized, things being what they are, that the teams that come for non-hockey reasons — like wanting to have a major pissup or wanting to see our particular backwater of the wide world — will tend to arrive early. A few of the serious, well-organized teams will show up early as well, so their players will have time to eat, catch some sleep, and generally unwind from traveling. The late-arriving teams will be the goofs — and the teams that have the least distance to travel. Since he knew that group would probably include the Roosters and Okenoke, one good team and another fairly decent team, it would mean the late draws have a decent mix as well.