The Last of the Lumbermen Read online

  If I’d been in my right mind, I would have realized that my blood alcohol was as topped up as everyone else’s. But wasn’t I Billy Menzies, the Bull Goose Loony of the Chilliwack Christian Lions, tournament all-star, Bedpost Diver Supreme, and All-Round Ace? I was in charge, and the power surge it gave me convinced me I was sober. And because I was sober and in charge, wasn’t I the one to drive the goddamn bus? What could be more logical?

  Never mind that I’d never driven a bus before, that I wasn’t licensed to drive anything more complicated than a pickup truck, that by getting behind the wheel I was voiding any insurance the team held, and that the bus was an old, rickety International Harvester school bus with a two-speed stick shift that’d been giving the Frenchman trouble. I was Mr. Can Do, Captain of the Mantua Cup Champions, the captain of the ship, driver of the bus.

  I took charge. To sober up my teammates I yanked down every window on the bus that would open. It had warmed up enough that they weren’t going to freeze to death, and even if they could, alcohol doesn’t freeze. A few of them, including Neil and Mikey, simply went to sleep with their heads hanging out the open window, and a couple more nodded off face up on the seats with their legs sticking out. And then, though I can’t quite remember this, I must have settled behind the wheel and started the motor. I remember the gears grinding as I slipped the old bus into gear, and eventually I had us lurching through the parking lot and onto the highway.

  THAT’S THE LAST THING I remember clearly. The rest I’ve had to piece together. It seems I got twenty klicks down that highway before I let the bus veer across the centre line on a curve that was sharper than it looked. I must have been thinking about something else, maybe the rhythm of the windshield wipers or a goal I’d scored during the tournament, or the red-headed girl I’d bopped. Or maybe I wasn’t thinking or seeing anything at all.

  That didn’t matter. What did was the semi-trailer, headlights on high beam, horn blasting, bearing down on me in the same lane. I remember that it didn’t seem to be bearing down on me very fast, and that I seemed to have time on my hands. I remember trying to wrench the bus out of the semi’s path, but nothing happening.

  The semi and the bus brushed one another, coming together just behind where I sat, and I heard the sickening sound of metal shrieking and grinding and tearing away, and inside that sound there was another, utterly distinct one, a sound that was far more strange and sickening, and one that I couldn’t possibly have heard.

  I did hear it. I couldn’t have seen what I saw next either, but I saw that as absolutely as I heard that sickening sound-withina-sound. In the split second after impact, I looked up to the rear-view mirror that had to have been ripped off by the initial impact and I saw human body parts tumbling through the illuminated air between the torn side of the bus and the jagged and receding metal of the semi. Three heads, an arm, part of a leg. Each one of the heads hit the tarmac as I watched, and then, I swear, bounced back up as high as the windows.

  Then they were gone, and the bus was cartwheeling across the road into a field of sagebrush.

  I WOKE UP IN a Kamloops hospital, a nice old building overlooking the city. From the windows I could see the North Thompson River stretching out to the northeast, languid and serene, and the huge weeping willows of Riverside Park where the North and equally languid South Thompson conjoined.

  The instant I woke up I knew Mikey was dead, because his had been one of the heads bouncing along the pavement. I found out later that Neil was dead too, along with two others, one of whom lost both legs from just below the knees. I had a third degree concussion, and a lot of bruises from bouncing around the bus after it flipped, but otherwise I was unhurt. Aside from the bus driver, who must have been wedged between the seats and the coach, I was the only person on the bus without broken bones.

  The hospital nurses were decent enough, given what I’d done. Everyone around the hospital seemed to know the whole story: I’d been driving the bus, and blood tests had revealed how far I’d been into the impaired zone. One nurse told me I’d been interviewed by the highway patrol while I was still half-conscious, and I guess I confessed to everything in lurid detail, including what I’d seen in the bus mirror. So everyone knew. And everyone, including most of the nurses, was giving me the cold stare.

  Before I was discharged from hospital the police charged me with impaired driving and vehicular manslaughter. Then, as if they’d decided that my goose was properly trussed and ready for cooking, they eased up and released me into the custody of my mother and stepfather on five thousand dollars’ bail. Neither Fred nor my mother said a word to me during the four-hour drive from Kamloops to Chilliwack. That was fine with me. I didn’t have anything to say, no excuses to make.

  For a week I stayed in the house while my bruises healed. I tried to read, watched a lot of television, some of it religious, and I stared at the wall. Before too long, I realized that while my body was going to heal there were some other parts of me no one could put a bandage on. I thought about killing myself or making a break for it, but I wasn’t capable of either. I’d take my lumps, do my time in jail, accept whatever anyone wanted to dish out to me.

  Fred Menzies didn’t see it the way I did. He sat me down the Sunday afternoon after the accident while my mother was out at a church auxiliary.

  “You know,” he said quietly, “that your life here is over.”

  Warily, I nodded agreement. “I guess,” I answered. “What’s going to happen?”

  “If you’re convicted, you’ll spend time in jail. And believe me, you’ll be convicted.” He began rummaging around in his jacket pocket, and stopped. “But that isn’t what I mean.”

  He looked at me long and hard. I let the silence hang between us without trying to excuse myself or apologize. I had a lot of things coming to me, and this lecture was the least of them. Fred had his right to it — he’d bailed me out of jail, and since then he’d somehow kept everyone away from me.

  But the lecture didn’t start, and I found myself looking back at him the way he was gazing at me. I really hadn’t realized that he gave a damn about me, but it was there in his hard face — along with the more easily recognized emotions. Finally, I couldn’t stand his pain any longer.

  “So, what do you mean, Fred?” I asked.

  His answer, after another long silence, was a single question: “What’s your name?”

  “What are you asking?” I answered. “I’m Billy Menzies.”

  “That isn’t your name from here on in,” he said with a dark, simple patience in his voice. “As of right now, your name is Andrew Bathgate.”

  He slapped what he’d been rummaging in his pockets for onto the table in front of me. It was a folded sheet of paper, and an envelope. I opened the piece of paper first. It was my original birth certificate, and it named me Andrew William Bathgate. In the envelope was two thousand dollars in hundreds and fifties.

  I looked up into Fred’s face for the explanation.

  “I want you out of here,” he said, “before your mother comes back.”

  NINE

  GORD PUSHES HIS WAY into the dressing room carrying three huge bundles of freshly dry-cleaned uniforms. He drops one into my lap.

  “Christ, Weaver,” he says, leaving the uniforms atop me and moving away to slam open the metal door to his locker. “You looked so peaceful there I was tempted to put the tubes in and drain you.”

  Aside from being my closest friend, and the district coroner, Gord is a trained mortician. He stopped practising long before I knew him, but the mortician’s sense of humour has stayed with him. I’ve seen him and Jack put perfectly sober people on the floor laughing with their Undertaker routine from the WWF, and he and I have a running joke about what morticians do with the gold teeth from cadavers.

  Gord got tired, as he puts it, of the makeup business, and went to medical school. But there’s a part of him that doesn’t forget
what he’s seen and done, and he doesn’t give up trade secrets, even to his close friends.

  And there are secrets, you know. Ever heard of anyone who’s asked what becomes of the gold from their loved one’s teeth after cremation? Well, neither have I, but the gold must be going somewhere. I figure there’s a lucrative underground trade in cada- ver gold that goes on between morticians and dental mechanics, but I’ll be damned if I can get Gord to confirm it. He just laughs at me, and claims the gold is vapourized by the heat.

  “I don’t think I’m quite ready for what you have in mind,” I laugh, pushing the bundle off me and onto the floor without sitting up. “Where have you been all afternoon?”

  He sighs. “Some kid drove his car off the road about forty kilometres south last night. No one knew they were missing until his girlfriend crawled back up to the road this morning.

  “Dead?”

  “Yeah,” he says. “You don’t want to know about it.”

  “What about the girl?”

  “She’ll be okay,” he answers, then adds, “someday.”

  “How old was the kid?”

  “About Wendel’s age. But not very much like Wendel.”

  “No one is.” I’m momentarily grateful for Wendel’s virtues, one of which is the kind of common sense that most males around here don’t have until they’re in their mid-thirties. If ever.

  “I feel sorry for most of them,” Gord says. “They’re just smart enough to see they’ve got no future. Their parents weren’t any smarter, but at least they had a shot at making a decent living. These kids are…”

  He falls silent, then shifts up a gear.

  “The Juniors are coming off the ice in few minutes,” he says. “Why don’t we suit up and burn off some lactic acid. Toss the puck around a little.”

  A glance at my wrist watch tells me I’ve got a little over an hour before I’m supposed to be home. Why not?

  THE JUNIORS COME FLOODING into the far end of the dressing room as we’re lacing up our skates. They’re pushing and shoving one another, high as kites on the combo of testosterone and adrenaline kids run on at that age. It makes me wonder, as I tramp the runway to the ice behind Gord’s massive back and thick neck, what guys like us are using for fuel. It ain’t testosterone anymore.

  But the moment we step on the ice, I remember why I’m still playing. Then I take my second step, on the left leg. A jolt runs up it into my spine, and I forget. The first turn around the ice, that’s how it goes: remember, forget, remember, forget, remember, forget.

  By the time we’ve circled the rink ten or fifteen times my left lumbar has loosened, and there are several more things I remember: the sound of steel against ice, the peculiar colour and crispness of the air over a hockey rink, the here and now of hockey, with everything else at bay in the world outside. There’s a zone of quiet inside me that matches it.

  Gord bangs his stick on the ice and a puck whistles by my head, just close enough to make me wince. “Man, but you are in Dreamland today,” he says. “You’d better not play like this tomorrow afternoon.”

  While I’m trying to think of something smart to say I hear a shout from the far end of the rink, and Junior crashes onto the ice, full gear, carrying a bucket of pucks.

  “Take some shots,” he hollers. “Look at what I’ve got.”

  Gord and I turn around to look, and it’s impossible not to see what he’s got. Even from this distance they look bigger than the old pads, probably because they’re white. From this distance, they make him look like a hospital nurse with elephant legs.

  “You finally talked Jack into new pads?” Gord asks as Junior skates toward us. “I don’t believe it.”

  “Oh, to hell with Jack,” Junior answers. “I gave up. Bought ‘em myself. What’s money when you’re in search of excellence.”

  Aha! I’ve seen Junior reading those business wanker books in the dressing room recently and now I know why.

  “This isn’t going to bankrupt me. I’ll write it off as a business expense.”

  Junior empties the bucket of pucks in front of us, tosses the bucket over the boards, and glides backward into the net. From just outside the blueline, Gord and I start punching pucks at his new pads.

  “These pads are a little more bouncy than the old ones,” I holler, as a rebound skitters back close to where I’m standing.

  “After all those years the old ones were like dead cushions on a pool table,” Junior yells back, doing a double take as Gord rings a shot off the post and in behind him. “It’ll keep the rebounds from dropping in front of me. Should cut a goal a game off my average right there.”

  “If you cut ten inches off your waistline,” Gord says, “you’d be able to see the puck when it’s in front of you.”

  “Screw off,” Junior sneers, gaily. “Now I won’t have to, will I?”

  Just for fun, I whistle a shot close to his head. On cue, he drops to the ice.

  “I see new pads haven’t improved that part of your game.”

  “Just shoot the fucking puck and keep it down,” Junior growls. “Either that or pay my dentist bills.”

  We pepper him with low shots for close to twenty minutes before he tires of it and retreats happily to the dressing room, taking the bucket and pucks with him. It’s quarter past seven, and there’s enough time for a couple more turns around the ice before Alpo Numinen, the Zamboni driver, will want us off so he can flood the rink for public skating.

  AS LOCAL CHARACTERS GO, Alpo is unique: to him, everything and everyone is intrinsically despicable. It doesn’t matter to him whether it’s his job, or hockey, old players, young players, recreation skaters, his Zamboni. As far as Alpo is concerned, life is a crapbag filled with clowns and villains, all of them out to disturb his peace or steal his dignity and sanity. Alpo’s only virtue is that he can bring up a different lump of crap out of the bag for everything.

  He hates his job because he gets razzed by the crowds, who regularly drone “Aaal-Pooooo, Aaaaal-Poooooo” at him while he’s flooding the ice between periods. He believes they’re mocking him, and he’s right — life can be rough when you have the same first name as a popular brand of dog food. He despises hockey because it’s too violent; he despises the older players because they know from experience what a sour goof he is; he despises the young players because they’re too stupid to pretend that they’re intimidated by his antics. That isn’t all. He despises recreational skaters because they’re (in his words) paying money to slide around on a sheet of ice, and he despises his Zamboni because it breaks down on him while he’s trying to flood the ice, making him the object of further taunts.

  Alpo saves the biggest, smelliest lump of bile to smear across the memory of his own son, Artie, who was until Wendel the only local kid to make it beyond Junior A hockey in Mantua. Artie got to the NHL about ten years ago for a cup of coffee, and as far as anyone knows, it was his final cup of coffee. He was last seen stumbling out of a bar on Long Island dead drunk, fine Mantua product that he is.

  Alpo hasn’t seen his kid since he left town for the NHL, but he’ll curse him out in front of anyone who’ll listen. And to give credit where credit’s due, he has his twisted reasons. As soon as Artie left town to go to Junior A in Peterborough, he changed his first name from Arno to Arthur, and his last name to Newman so no one would think he was one of those pansy Europeans. As far as Alpo was concerned, Artie was betraying his Finnish heritage.

  Alpo is exaggerating here a little, since he didn’t exactly arrive here straight from a smorgasbord himself. He’s a third-generation cheeseburger like most everyone else around here. The only thing about him that’s Finnish is his name and maybe his sour temperament — although lately I’ve heard him mouthing things in some bjarny-bjarny language to impress the Juniors. Since the most consistent thing about Alpo — aside from his bad temper — is his laziness, he probably got his knowl
edge of Finnish from IKEA commercials on television.

  I’ve never met Artie, but Gord says he was a decent kid, although — like his old man — chronically lazy. That probably explains why he didn’t stay in the NHL, together with the fact that he’d had his appetite for climbing into the piss-tank since he was fifteen. That’s hardly unique around here.

  I don’t get people like Alpo, to tell the truth. Life kicks every- one, but that’s no excuse to whine about it all day and all night. Alpo’s job is really a pretty decent one. A City maintenance super- visor’s wages get him a new pickup every two or three years, and he really doesn’t need to take all the crap he gets. Fact is, he chooses to run the Zamboni at all the big events because it gives him something to bitch about. If I had his job, I’d use the facilities every chance I got. Alpo? He hasn’t been on skates for years, just out of sheer perversity.

  Look at it this way: life is reasonably sweet provided you don’t stick the air pump into your miseries, which everyone has. So we don’t live in Los Angeles, and we’re not all rich movie producers. We’re not exactly in Mogadishu shaking empty milk jugs at the United Nations, either. If you live in Los Angeles, you make money, go to film premieres, and keep a loaded gun under your pillow. Fine with me. Even in Mogadishu there’s the beach. And if you find yourself driving a Zamboni at the Mantua Memorial Coliseum, for crying out loud, go skating once in a while.

  THE GATES AT THE Coliseum’s far end swing open, and I hear Alpo shouting at us.

  “Alright, you jerk-offs, get off my ice before I come and run you down.”

  I look at my watch. It’s past seven-thirty, and Gord and I have been skating, side by side, for almost ten minutes without a word exchanged.

  TEN

  I’M NOT A TOTAL ditz. As soon as I have my skates off, I call the Lotus Inn from the phone in Jack’s office. I have a standard order for them: mu shu pork, beef with black bean and garlic sauce, and their special chow mein with shredded duck. Neither Esther nor I are what you’d call hearty eaters, but Bozo makes up for us. If she had her way, she’d go off dog food permanently and live on chow mein. So we usually order more food than we’ll need, eat what we like, and let her have the rest. Most of the time, that means she gets nearly all the chow mein.