The Last of the Lumbermen (13 page)

FOURTEEN

T
HE THREE OF US
sat up until after two
AM
talking about the tournament.

We talked about it,
sure, but agreed? Not bloody likely. By
the time I got back to the house Esther had bought
into Wendel's enthusiasm, and I was outnumbered and outgunned.
So they brainstormed about how to reinvent the Mantua Cup
tournament — already real in their minds — and
I offered them arguments why what they
were suggesting was impractical, ill-advised, and goofy. When that
didn't deflate their enthusiasm, I went to impossible, suicidal, and deranged.

Nothing
I said deterred them. It was like discussing how
to soft-boil eggs with a steamroller — in this case,
two steamrollers. Esther and Wendel rolled over whatever
dish I served up, crunch, crunch, crunch.

The next
morning, I can hear Wendel snoring on the couch
while I make some scrambled eggs. He's inherited a version
of his mother's gift for sound sleep, except that
his sound sleep could drown out a band saw
. Bozo is outside somewhere on dog business, having
wolfed down her breakfast and splashed most of the contents of her water dish across the kitchen floor
.

I'm not expecting Esther in the kitchen. She likes to be awakened Sunday morning by breakfast in bed, and I
rarely get a word out of her before
her stomach has fully communed with a steaming cup of black coffee.

When
the eggs are ready I shut off
Wendel's sawmill imitation by putting my hand over his open
mouth. On cue, his eyes pop open. “Breakfast, chum,” I tell him. “Serve yourself.”

He staggers into
the kitchen behind me to watch me load a tray with
orange juice, black coffee, and a second plate of
eggs for Esther. She snaps awake the moment I
sit down on the bed next to her, smiles, and
sits up. I prop a couple of pillows behind
her back while she settles the tray in front
of her, sips a first and second draught of co
ffee, then samples the eggs, all without a word. T
alked herself out last night, I guess.

Okay by me. I return to the kitchen, wher
e I shovel the remainder of the scrambled eggs onto
a plate, top up my coffee, and sit down ac
ross from Wendel, who is emptying a nearly
full bottle of ketchup across his eggs. He's as silent
as his mother, but without the smile.

Game time is one-thirty,
so there's no need to hurry. It's almost
ten before Esther wanders out and orders me into the bedroom.

“What for?” I ask, mainly for Wendel's benefit.

“Your back, silly.
I'm not letting you out of here until I've worked out those kinks I found yeste
rday.”

Wendel ignores us, too busy shoveling
mouthfuls of a second batch of ketchup and eggs he's made for himself into his mouth.

It's amazing the way normality
asserts itself. Every and any crisis we go through —
short of actually dying — attaches itself to whatever live
normalities it grows from, and weaves itself into the
fabric. Yesterday's revelations — Esther's confession and
my accidental discovery about Wendel — are
already
normal. This morning and its specific priorities — breakfast,
preparation for the game — don't leave enough
room for the crisis to go on clamouring for attention.
The real world has ordered it into
the back seat and told it to shut up unless spoken to. It's as if the past is the child of
the present, not its parent. Life is going to
go on. Sometime in the near future I'll have
to figure out how to make a clean
breast of things, but not right now. Maybe,
like this morning, the three of us will eat
scrambled eggs together when that secret is gone. I
sure as hell hope so. This morning, anything seems possible.

ESTHER
DROPS ME OFF
at the arena around
noon, and wanders off on some errand of her own.
She'll be back at the Coliseum by game time even
though she's long since stop watching the warmups. Too
many chilly early mornings years ago helping Wendel lace up his skates, I guess.

Wendel,
never one to hang around in the morning, left
the house while Esther was still working over my back. By
the time I get to the Coliseum dressing room
he's there, suited up, and he's lacing on his
skates all by himself. Gord and most of the
other players have arrived and are in various states of readiness.

Jack breezes in from the
direction of the ice, still in his civvies, frowning.
“Gonna be a rough one today,” he says.
“The Roosters stayed out of the bars last night.”

This is not good news. The Roosters ar
e much easier to play when they're hung over.
They're not any nicer or any less owly,
but they're slower. Chances are the Old
Man lowered the boom on them after what happened in Okenoke Friday night.

“They'll take it out
on us,” Bobby Bell whines from across the r
oom.

“Maybe you should practise your diving instead of doing
your normal warm-up,” Gord answers.

He doesn't mean this entirely as a
joke. We're neither the biggest nor the bravest
team in the
NSHL
. On a good night we'll hold
our own against the Bears or the Stingers, but the
Roosters, like I said, are different. They have
a nasty habit of skating with their sticks at jugular height while they're not carrying the puck, and more than one player on our team
has found himself spitting out his own teeth after forgetting it.

So that's what we're
thinking about in the dressing room: getting slashed,
cross-checked, crushed, splattered, splayed, beaten up. Except
Gord, who has this dreamy look in his
eyes, like he's thinking something serene and Buddhist. With
him, you
never
know.

THE PRE-GAME WARM-UP
IS
uneventful,
meaning that none of the Roosters crosses the
red line to beat on us. As I line up
for the opening face-off, Godin, the referee,
delivers a speech to Neil Ratsloff and I
that makes it sound like we're about to begin
one of those twelve-man over-the-ropes wrestling matches,
not a hockey game. Or maybe it's boxing he's thinking
of, probably because Neil is standing across
the circle giving me the old Sonny Liston stare-down. I wait for Godin to finish.

“I
don't know why you're telling me this,” I grin
at him. “Tell that crazy sonofabitch. I'm just here to play hockey.”

Godin rolls his eyes
and drops the puck. I swipe it back
ward to my left and step aside as Ratslof
f rolls through the spot I've just vacated. Bobby
Bell takes the puck, pulls it toward his body
momentarily, then, from just beyond our blueline, flicks
it ahead to Jack, who is skating, not very fast,
toward the Rooster blueline. Jack plays the puck off
his skate onto his stick and crosses the blueline
without looking up. Then he does something very uncharacteristic: he veers toward the slot, still holding the puck.

Jack
doesn't see JoMo Ratsloff coming at him until the
last second. When he tries to deke left to avoid a
collision, JoMo, the oldest and dirtiest of the Roosters,
splays his big knees wide and pumps forward, catching
Jack's right knee flush. Jack goes down, sliding though the
left face-off circle in a heap, with the puck underneath him.

It's no dive. He's hurt. I spin around, looking for Godin, but his back is turned, and, inter
estingly, his head is down. He's examining his whistle as if he thinks the pea has dropped out.

Gord
doesn't wait for Godin. He drops his right glove
as he crosses the blueline, skates a couple of steps
and plants his bare fist in the middle of
JoMo's grin as he comes out of the spinaround.
The punch connects with a “whup” that sounds like someone
kicking an empty cardboard box, and down goes
JoMo on his backside. He doesn't move except for the blood
spurting from his ruined nose.

A few seconds later I'm waltzing a
round the ice with Neil Ratsloff, who is doing
all the usual dance steps, along with one I haven't seen
before. He keeps lifting me off the ice
and shaking me like a wolf would a rabbit. It's
annoying, but he could just as easily be pounding my skull
against the ice. Jimmy Ratsloff makes a half-hearted lunge
at Gord, but Gord catches his arm as he
comes in, spins, and flings him toward the net.
Everyone else is dancing too, except the goalies. The moment
Gord clobbered JoMo, Lenny Nakamoto went kiyiing down the
ice to pair up with Junior. Junior, as
usual, isn't having any of it, and is playing peekaboo with
Lenny around our net. JoMo is still out cold,
and Old Man Ratsloff is soft-shoeing across
the ice toward him with a towel and a bucket of ice.

“I don't know why the
fuck I have to play against you,” Neil is grumbling,
looking very much like he'd rather make a run
at Gord, who is now bending solicitously over Jack.

“Why don't you go for it?” I suggest. “Die young.”

This time Neil does take a swing at
me, but I duck the punch and lean on him,
Muhammad Ali-style. I'm lucky enough to get hold of both his
burly arms, and I bury my face in his sweater
and try to push him toward the boards.
Just as I'm about to lose my grip I hear Old
Man Ratsloff yell his name, and Neil stops flailing
at me.

“Let's cut this shit,” I say. “Jack is hurt.”

Neil lets go of me without a word and grabs Dickie Pollard, one of our defencemen who normally just heads for the bench
the moment there's a fight. Gord is motioning for
Geezo Williams, our trainer, to come onto the ice,
but Geezo is standing on the bench, motioning Fred
Milgenberger out of the stands. Fred is a docto
r, and I see him begin to move across
the benches to the walkway.

The look on Jack's face
alone convinces me. He's as white as a sheet, grimacing,
and pawing at his right knee. “Jesus, Jesus,” he groans,
and gazes up into Gord's concerned face. “That's it
for me. I'm gone for the season, done.”

“You'll be fine,” Gord says, not sounding
very convincing. “You took one hell of a whack
on your knee there. Maybe you can skate it off.”

Jack str
uggles to get up, but Gord recognizes that it's
too painful and plants his big fist in the middle
of Jack's chest to keep him down.

Jack closes his eyes, lets out
a wail, and opens one eye. This time he's looking at
me, knowing I have a glass head. I shrug
and turn away. I heard the ligaments go,
and I can't hide it as well as Gord can.

Geezo
and Milgenberger take over, and Gord and
I skate to the corner to confer.

“It's bad,” I say.

Gord nods. “You wanna coach, or do I have to?”

“You
do it. We'll double-shift Wendel, keep it simple. I'll
help.”

Godin skates by Jack to take a look, then stops
in front of us, arms folded. In spite of
the referee posture, he's got a guilty look
on his face. “Five minutes,” he says to Gord.

“Did you call five on JoMo's hit?” Gord
demands. “That was a deliberate attempt to injure.”