The Last of the Lumbermen Read online

  I reach over to comfort her, but she pushes me away. “Listen, Sweetie,” I mumble, “It’s okay. Why don’t we go someplace and have a drink. Would that make you feel better?”

  “Maybe,” she says, and buries her face in the handkerchief she’s pulled from her purse. I start the car and steer it slowly through the jumble of the parking lot.

  SEVEN

  WHEN ESTHER IS ON her game, watching her chase a mara- schino cherry around a glass full of bourbon and grenadine is one of my ideas of fun. But an hour in the bar and two Old Fashioneds doesn’t brighten her mood, and I don’t learn anything about what’s gotten under her skin except that she’s more upset than pissed off, and that she’s seriously upset about something she can’t — or won’t — talk about.

  So I sip my soda water and let the hour slip by clinking ice cubes around the glass, staring out the window, and letting the painful silences grow longer and more painful. I keep thinking about one of Esther’s pet theories — the Freudian Slip one, about how nobody ever says anything they don’t mean. Personally I think that’s going too far, but she takes it seriously. I know that with all the things I’m hiding from her we’re knee deep in banana peels here, but damned if I can zero in on the one I’ve slipped on.

  So I look to see if there are any banana trees: is this about her wanting us to get married? Maybe. But why hasn’t marriage come up until now? If that’s what this is about, I’ve got the answer: we’ll get married.

  Does she want me to adopt Wendel? I’d go with that too even if it doesn’t make sense. Wendel is over nineteen, and adoption probably isn’t even legally possible at his age. And he’d never agree to it.

  “Let’s go home,” she says, finally. “This isn’t working. I think I need to be alone for a while.”

  “Okay. But I wish I could figure out what to say to make you feel better.”

  “This isn’t your fault,” she says, not quite meeting my eyes — and thus confirming that it most certainly damn well is my fault. “Just give me a couple of hours and I’ll be fine.”

  It’s a pointed hint that I should make myself scarce for a while, so I help her put away the groceries when we get home, watch a few minutes of the Hockey Night in Canada pre-game, and then announce that I’m going down to the Coliseum to work on the new sticks.

  “How about I pick up some Chinese on the way home?”

  “Fine,” she says.

  I press a small kiss on her forehead but don’t put my arms around her. “See you about eight,” I whisper. She doesn’t answer.

  I WALK OUT OF the house without my car keys, and instead of going back inside to retrieve them — it seems important that I not appear to be a bigger nitwit than I already do — I get into the car and dig under the seat for the spare set I keep hidden under the mat. The keys are there, and so, surprise, is a wallet. I pull it out, dump it on the seat beside me, and flip it open. It’s Wendel’s youthful kisser staring up at me from behind the plastic driver’s licence panel. I close it, and make a mental note to phone Esther from the Coliseum so she can let him know I have it — not that he’s likely to miss it. Wendel never spends money, and he’s too much like Jesus for the cops to pull him over.

  By the time I arrive at the Coliseum Gord has left, but Jack is still there. He’s on the phone with the dry cleaner, trying to get the team uniforms out before tomorrow’s game. He isn’t having much luck.

  I wave to him as I enter and he waves back, distractedly. I plunk the new sticks down on the bench, place the first one in the set of wood clamps mounted on it, and poke through the toolbox for the wood rasps I keep there.

  Jack slams the phone down. “ Stupid idiot,” he grumbles. “I told him we had two home games this weekend, but he never listens.”

  The dry cleaner is Korean, formal and polite the way all the Koreans around here are. I take my personal cleaning to him, he hasn’t lost anything so far, and my clothes come back without being shredded by his machines. Most of the time, anyway.

  “He listens okay,” I point out. “He just doesn’t understand everything you say to him. Be reasonable.”

  “Well,” Jack grumbles. “I don’t like his attitude.”

  “Who gives a damn about his attitude?” I laugh. “You’re using him because his dry cleaning prices are thirty percent cheaper than anyone else’s.”

  Jack sighs. “I know, I know,” he says. “But Jesus H. Christ, can’t anything ever go right around here?”

  “It’s the North,” I say. “Everything is supposed to go wrong. Any- way, we can wear our away uniforms. We’ve done that before.”

  Jack takes this as an invitation to complain about the uniforms and the team name, both of which he hates. “You’d think they could have named the stupid team properly,” he says. “Mantua Mohawks. What kind of a stupid name is that when there isn’t a real Mohawk living this side of the Quebec border?”

  I’ve sat through this rant dozens of times, but it’s fun to see what variations he’ll add to it. I also know the history. The name came from Jack’s predecessor as GM, Wilf Cruikshank, a trendyheaded city alderman when the Memorial Coliseum was built.

  “I mean, what’s the name got to do with anything except alliteration?” he continues. “Might as well have been the Hopis, or the fucking Pueblos.”

  “Or the Apaches,” I cut in. “At least they speak the same lan- guage root as the native people around here. And anyway, you know why we’re called the Mohawks.”

  “Oh yeah, sure. So Cruikshank could put those chintzy Taiwanese Chief Wahoo crests on the jerseys.”

  Cruikshank owned a surplus clothing outfit, and it’s a popular theory that he got our original uniforms, along with a two- hundred-year supply of Chief Wahoo crests, on the cheap. Still, I can’t help myself. “Well,” I say, “Maybe Cruikshank was a Cleve- land Indians fan.”

  “I don’t give a purple crap if he was Chiang Kai-Chek’s long- lost brother,” Jack roars, taking the bait. “We’re not a bloody baseball team, and it’s looked stupid from the beginning. I don’t know what was wrong with calling us the Lumbermen like they used to.”

  We both know the answer to that one. The Lumbermen were the team that used to play in the old wooden arena before it fell down, and someone, probably Cruikshank — together with the same large minds who decided that the new arena ought to be a “Memorial Coliseum” — decided to come up with a new, catchy name for the city’s hockey team.

  “Didn’t they change the name because the Lumbermen lost all the time?”

  “Well, so do we,” Jack snaps, “and we have to do it with Chief Wahoo plastered on the fronts of our stupid jerseys.”

  I don’t take this as a personal affront the way Jack does, but I’m not going argue it with him. The uniforms are otherwise pretty much the same black, red, and white of the Chicago Blackhawks, and they’re better looking than the former Soviet National team uniforms the Roosters are currently using — Ratsloff probably got those off one of his Russian relatives, who are sure to be the Russian version of the Canadian branch of the family. And they’re a hell of a lot more attractive than the bright purple and white jobbies the Stingers have, or the baby blue and yellow of the Bears, which Gord tells everyone they bought from the Ukrainian National Gay team.

  It’s time to change the subject before Jack blows a fuse. “So what’s the juice on the Ratsloff twins?” I ask. “I take it they got out of jail, or you wouldn’t be fussing over the uniforms.”

  Junior, our ducking goalie, walks in as I’m asking the question, and he answers for Jack.

  “Yeah,” he says. “The cops agreed to let the twins out and the Ratsloffs agreed not to burn the town.”

  “That’s close,” Jack concurs. “Who told you?”

  “I been monitoring police band.”

  Junior, whose real name is Don Young, Jr. — hence the nickname — has come in to complain
to Jack about his pads again. He does this about once a week, and rarely gets past the non-door of Jack’s semi-office.

  “You’d better come in here,” Jack says to him, flashing a wink in my direction at the same time. “No doubt you’ve got something interesting to tell me.”

  Junior is a second-generation goalie, and he has his job because his father, Don Young, Sr., was the goalie for the old Mantua Lumbermen. I think there’s a part of Junior that would rather skip playing hockey and spend his time pissing around with ham radio and running his father’s appliance repair shop, but the old man won’t let him. For Don Sr. hockey was a manhood thing, and he insists Junior play the game the same way he did — with- out a mask.

  This is not without its problems for Junior. Like most people, he has a perfectly sane instinct to duck when small, rock-hard objects are directed at his head at high speeds. Naturally, every- one in the league knows this — they’ve known it for forty years, because Don Young, Sr. had the same instinct while he played. The difference is that Young Sr. played in the era before the slap- shot was invented, and the game still had a few unwritten rules. In the old man’s day, two or three pucks a game might stray above the goalie’s shoulder in an average game. This being the era of cheat, lie, steal, fight with pipe wrench, every second shot taken at Junior is aimed at the bridge of his nose. He’s just lucky most of the bozos in this league can’t shoot straight. As it is, he’s has taken eighty or ninety stitches in the head since I’ve been around.

  The good side — there really isn’t one, but we pretend there is — is that on shots along the ice Junior is decent. So what if Stan Lagace, his backup, is a better goalie? So what if there are better goalies playing Peewee and Midget on Saturday morning? After forty years the Youngs are a Mantua tradition. Besides which, Jack and Don Sr. are old friends.

  This one-sided argument has been going between Junior and Jack for about two years now. Junior wants the team to pay for some new, lightweight pads — probably oversized, if I know Junior — and Jack is either too cheap to shell out for them, or he has a side deal with Don Sr. not to mess with the family equipment, all of which Junior inherited from his father when he retired — including the undersized brain.

  JACK AND JUNIOR ARE in the office a long time. I hear them raise their voices several times but I don’t really listen — I know which way this one is going to come out. Just as I’m finishing the third stick, over an hour later, Junior comes out with the predictable long face.

  “Fucking cheapskate,” he mumbles as he passes me.

  “Why don’t you ask him for a goalie mask,” I suggest, “and then settle for new pads when he refuses?”

  Junior stops and turns around. “Because the pervert probably would buy me a goalie mask,” he answers. “Just to screw with me. And then,” he turns again and heads through the doorways, “where would I be?”

  “Just trying to helpful.”

  I see him wave his arms in the air as the door closes. “Sure, Weaver,” his voice drifts back from the hallway. “Go do yourself.”

  Jack doesn’t come out of his office until I’ve finished shaving down the last stick. Judging from the look on his face talking to Junior made his pissy mood worse, so I let him be. He looks at me and glowers before he returns my courtesy. I bundle the sticks together with some black tape and put them in my locker, then climb onto the training table to do my stretching routine. My lower back still feels fairly loose, but the earlier tightness in my chest has worked its way from mild up to a solid medium. When I poke my finger along my breastbone above the heart there’s another sensation. It isn’t quite pain, but it ain’t muscle stiffness either.

  I start into a long-familiar routine: both knees up to the chest, hold that for thirty or forty seconds, then one knee at a time. Then I take a break — this is part of the routine, too — and stare at the bare light bulb above my head. This isn’t just because I’m from the Satchel Paige school of exercise. I am, but this isn’t to avoid doing the next stretch. I’ve done some of my best thinking lying on this table staring into the light bulb. And right now, I’ve got some items to think through.

  One of them is how to get along better with Wendel. He really isn’t such a bad kid — just a little righteous, that’s all. He’s probably like his father must have been, but smarter about it, or faster — at least on the ice.

  How do I know that? Well, if I explain it, I have to explain a nightmare, and nobody can explain their nightmares. So let me put it together for you as a straight-up story, and we’ll forget what it does to my head to remember it.

  EIGHT

  I WOULDN’T SAY I KNEW Wendel’s father well. He was a guy I had couple of on-ice run-ins with. Leo Simons played defence for the then-newly minted Mantua Mohawks both years I came up with the Christian Lions. The first year, Mantua blew their first two games and we didn’t get to play them. The second year, we drew Mantua in the first round. Early in the second period I crosschecked Leo head-first into the boards, and he came up swinging. We both got five minute majors for fighting, and I got an extra two for cross-checking. He was decent with his fists, but that was about it: he was slow, ugly with the puck, and he couldn’t read a forward to save his soul. Wendel gets his talent from Esther’s side of the family, I guess.

  Leo didn’t strike me as a speed demon off the ice, either. For sure he didn’t have it to protect his girlfriend from a flash like me. But now that I think back on it, I thought everyone was slow-witted then, so who’s to say what Leo Simons was really about. He turned out to be a pretty decent guy.

  I know what you’re thinking: I was the asshole, giant economy size. I was a twenty-year-old guy and when you’re that age it isn’t who or what you are that counts, it’s what you do and what you get. I was Mr. Can Do. Can score, can stickhandle, can drink, can score with the concession girls at will. My undershorts weren’t getting knotted up with a lot of deep thoughts in those days.

  I did play some hockey in those tournaments. I potted eleven goals in the five games of that second tournament. Don’t know why that statistic has stayed with me. I don’t recall much of anything from the first tournament, but I must have scored a few in that one, too. They named me first all-star in the first tournament, though I only made second all-star in the second. Maybe the reason I can’t remember anything about the first tournament is that I was either drunk, asleep, hungover, or on the ice the whole time I was there. Not one second reading the Bible or thinking deep thoughts. The second tournament, as you know, I got a few other things done.

  The way they selected the all-stars for the second tourney was probably a message to us not to come back, because though we creamed every team we played I was the only Lion named to an all-star team. And when they presented us with the trophy and the two thousand dollars in prize money after the final game, they made a bigger to-do of calling the all-stars down onto the ice than they did of presenting us with the Cup. The player who beat me out for first all-star centre was a sorry-looking kid from Northern Alberta whose team we knocked out in the semis. I scored two goals in that game, and the player we had checking the kid flattened him every time he crossed our blueline. I’d have been surprised to hear he’d gotten a shot on goal in that game, unless he shot it from behind his own net.

  After the trophy presentation, we — my two closest friends on the team, Neil DeBerk and a Metis kid named Mikey Davidson — pulled our share of the trophy cash, cadged more from the other players, and caught a taxi out to the local bootlegger’s place. We drove through a snowstorm for half an hour, filled the taxi’s trunk and most of the back seat with beer, skidded the thing back to the Coliseum, and unloaded the contents through the emergency door of the bus. Then we told Mantua and its snow banks what they could do with one another, and headed south.

  By the time we were three hundred klicks down the high- way the snow had turned to sleet, and everyone was loaded — including the coach, who’d been
drinking all weekend anyway, even during the games. By the time we reached the junction where the roads divide off to the Okanagan Valley or through the Fraser Canyon to Chilliwack and the coast, it was fifteen degrees warmer and raining.

  The bus driver pulled in at the junction’s Greyhound depot so we could empty our tanks. In a fog, I remember everyone piling out of the bus, shouting and banging on the hoods of parked cars as we navigated our way through the muddy lot to the depot. As I left the bus myself I noticed the coach was passed out in his seat, not stirring a muscle. I thought about waking him up, saw his silver mickey in his lap, and decided he’d appreciate sleep more than a piss-call. That was the first of the big mistakes I made.

  I guess because I’d been the instigator of the beer buy and the coach was in dreamland I got the perfectly lousy idea that I was now responsible for keeping things together. As I watched my teammates stumble and trip over one another as they wended their way across the parking lot to the washrooms, I saw the bus driver — a mean-eyed middle-aged French Canadian I’d run into at every bar I drank in while we were in Mantua — wending pretty erratically himself.

  Bad sign. I crawled back into the bus and checked the map compartment to the left of the driver’s seat. There were a couple of mickeys of rye in it, both empty. NOW WHAT? I remember thinking.

  I had the answer: I would have to take charge. I paused to take my leak behind the bus, then counted out my teammates as, one by one, they staggered back onto the bus. Everyone present and accounted for — except the driver.

  I staggered into the depot, where I found him in one of the washroom cubicles, passed out on the toilet seat. I crawled over the top of the cubicle and made a half-hearted try at slapping him awake — half-hearted because he was plainly far too hammered to wake up, let alone drive. So I pulled him across my shoulders and carried him back to the bus, where I somehow dropped him into an empty seat. When he slid to the floor like the bundle of irresponsible crap he was, I let him lie there. That way, at least, he’d puke on the floor and not all over the equipment bag on the seat beside him.