The Last of the Lumbermen (14 page)

Godin looks away, and
repeats himself. “Five minutes. For fighting. Now get off
the ice before I give you two more
for instigating.”

Gord skates after Godin. “You're not calling a deliberate on JoMo?” he hisses, herding Godin into
a corner and standing over him. “We've got a man
lying on the ice with torn knee ligaments and you're not calling it?”

“I
didn't see it,” Godin answers, weakly. “I'm calling five
minutes on you for fighting, and I could cha
rge you for attempted murder. So get your
ass over to the penalty box before I call
a misconduct.”

Gord doesn't back off. “Listen, you cowar
dly prick,” he snarls, managing to crowd Godin against the
boards without actually touching him. “If you don't make
the calls, I'll pull your fucking arms out of their sockets
and jam them up your ass, whistle and all. You got that?”

“That's enough for a misconduct,” Godin snaps, and tries to skate awa
y.

Gord circles around him and stops
in his path. “Where's the misconduct?” he says, reasonably
. “I'm going to wait until after the game and do
you in the parking lot. You drive that red
Ford 250, right?”

It's a stand-off, but Gor
d has apparently made his point: Godin, when he skates
shakily over to the timekeeper, doesn't call insti
gating on him, or a misconduct, and JoMo gets five minutes, too.

I skate over to the bench to explain what's happening
to the rest of the players. I can see they'd
like to come off the bench for a brawl,
but wiser heads — probably Wendel's, since we're
not exactly deep in wise men — prevail.

“We'll just play the game,” I sa
y. “Wendel, you can double-shift our line and we'll see how it goes.”

Indeed we will. W
e've still got fifty-nine more minutes of this horseshit to get through.

FIFTEEN

I
T TAKES TEN MINUTES
for the Roosters to scrape JoMo
off the ice and cart him into the
dressing room, and at least ten more
for us to stretcher Jack off the ice
and into the same ambulance they've got JoMo in. After
that, the first period is pretty routine.
When the buzzer sounds, we're down three to one.

The Roosters are banging on us
like they usually do, and they're shooting high on Junio
r, who is ducking like he usually does. His new
white pads don't help much — all three Rooster
goals go in over his shoulder. Wendel scores
our goal on a breakaway, sent in alone by
a neat flip pass from Gord. I'm not
being checked very hard, but it doesn't seem to
matter. After years of playing with two slow players, I
can't quite connect with Wendel. Every time I look, he's two or th
ree steps ahead of where I think he's going to be.

During the intermission I notice that Junior is
looking more spooked than usual, and I suggest to Go
rd that we sub in Stan Lagace, who's only played
about thirty minutes all year. Gord looks
at me like I've just crapped on the floor.
“Junior's our goalie,” he says.

I understand what he's saying.
It's a variation on his work- ing premise about
everything: loyal and local. Junior's our goalie because
his father was the goalie before him. If Junior's seven-year-old son wanted to play goalie,
he'd be the backup if Gord had anything to say
about it. Stan knows all about this, but he's such
a glue-sniffer I don't think he cares. He
gets his min- utes playing commercial league at th
ree AM, and he sits on our bench game after
game, waiting for his chance like a pilgrim waiting for the return of Jesus.

Whether
we win or lose doesn't mean very much to Gor
d. He'd prefer to lose a hockey game the right
way than win the wrong way. He gets
his wish, too. Half of it, anyway: we lose and
we lose.

Who's going to object? Not Jack. He believes that
so long as we have that stupid Chief Wahoo c
rest on our jerseys we deserve to lose. I see
Wendel get irritated with losing once in a while, but
nobody listens to him anyway, and most of the
rest of the players are so used to getting
thumped by the Roosters they wouldn't know what to do if
we did win. Me? I like playing with Gord
better than anyone I've ever played with, so doing things
his way is fine with me. Hockey is supposed to be a
game
, remember?

THE SECOND PERIOD BEGINS
with a bang — literally. Neil Ratsloff gets away
from me right off the face-off, skates
across the blue line, winds up like he's Br
ett Hull, and lets a slapshot go. It's high, naturally,
but he's so close to the net that Junior doesn't
have time to duck. The puck catches him on the
side of his fore- head, spins high into the
crowd, and Junior crumples to the ice with blood spilling from a nasty gash.

He comes to faster than JoMo Ratsloff did, but
when he does he doesn't have a clue where
he is or what he's supposed to be doing.
While Geezo tries to staunch the flow of blood —
Milgen- berger is still at the hospital with Jack
and JoMo — Junior wanders up and down the
ice, throwing his stick and gloves into the stands
and trying, as far as I can figure
out, to execute some quite compli- cated figure skating
moves. The crowd thinks this is pretty funny
, but the players — the Roosters included — understand it better. It's one thing to get your bell rung, but the
way Junior is acting that shot may have cracked it.

We have to dragoon him
off the ice and into the dressing room,
where Gord and I help Geezo immobilize him
so the cut can be worked on. That's easier said than
done because Junior won't lie still, and even Gor
d has trouble holding him down. We lose anothe
r ten minutes trying to settle him enough that Geezo
can patch him up, and by the time Go
rd and I return to the ice the cr
owd is getting bitchy.

The same little bugger who was
riding me Friday night is in his usual seat, leading
the pack. As I skate back to the bench I
catch his eye and motion him down. He surprises me and
does what I ask. By the time I get ther
e, he's jumped up on the ledge and is leaning over the glass.

“What's your name, kid?” I gr
owl.

Again he surprises me, this time by answering politely.
“James, sir.”

“James what?”

He delivers surprise number three: “James Bathgate, sir.”

Is this kid hosing me?
I whack my stick against the sideboards for effect. “So just exactly wher
e are your parents, kid?”

“At home, sir. They don't approve of hockey.”

“Well,” I say
, pulling off my gloves and flexing my knuckles under
his nose. “Listen up. If I hear any more
out of you tonight I'm going to squeeze your head
until your brains come squirting out of your ears.”

“Yes sir.”

“And stop calling me ‘sir'!”

As
he retreats back into the stands I hear his
high, unmistakable voice. “Yes sir, you asshole, sir!”

I'm laughing out loud when I sit back down, and so is everyone else on the bench. Even Wendel. The kid is good.

OUR PLAY IN THE
second period
is looser, but it doesn't seem to help. We'r
e in our end for most of it, and I
still can't locate Wendel. Twelve minutes in, they're up
on us five-two. But we're lucky in one way
. If Junior had been in the nets the Roosters
would have had a dozen goals, because they keep shooting high.
That doesn't bother Stan Lagace in the least, even when
one glances off his mask. It isn't that his glove
hand is quicker than Junior's, just that he doesn't flinch and duck.

As the
period begins to wane I find myself sitting on the
bench next to Wendel. He looks right at me. “Speed
it up a little, Weaver,” he says. You're playing me like I'm in the next time zone.”

My
first impulse is to tell him to screw o
ff. Then I remember I'm his father, and try
to hear what he's telling me. “What do you mean?” I ask.

W
endel is visibly surprised. But after a hard look
to ensure that I'm not setting him up for some
gag, he gives it a try. “Well,” he
says, “Gord isn't having any trouble adjusting. He's
seeing me where I am. But I see you
looking behind me, expecting me to be where your
clock puts Jack and Gord. Turn your time switch
up a little bit, and see what's there. Think
of it as daylight saving.”

He isn't grinning when he tells
me this, so he's not just jiving me about
being old and slow. He's talking on terms that
I under- stand. Gord and I have talked
a lot about what allows us to play with players who are much faster than we are.

I slap him on the shoulder as we're clambering
over the boards for our next shift. “I
think I know what you're talking about,” I tel
l him. “I'll see if I can adjust.”

About halfway into the shift, with only a minute
or two left in the period, I find myself mucking
along the boards for the puck. I hear a stick
slap the ice; without looking, I know
exactly
where
Wendel is, and what he's going to do. I push
away the Rooster who's checking me, and backhand the puck
hard through the air across centre. I
duck an elbow, and up-ice I see Wendel
folding himself behind the puck on a clean breakaway. He swoops in on Lenny Nakamoto and dekes left as Lenny sprawls across
the crease. Lenny's too late and too slow. It's an easy, pretty goal.

WENDEL AND I IGNORE
one
another during the intermission, both of us wary of acknowledging
that we co-operated on some- thing that was actually
quite beautiful. I've got other fish to fry, anyway.
Milgenberger is on the blower from the hospital
telling us that Jack has probably torn every ligament
in his right knee. It takes a while to get
the medical explanation because Milgen- berger is so
upset about it. The stupid dork keeps using the exp
ression “shredded.”

“It's bad, eh?” I commiserate, simultaneously shaking my
head at Gord.

“Real bad,” Milgenberger confirms. “Shredded. He's
going to have trouble walking on this one after
it's healed, never mind playing hockey. I'd say his playing days are over.”

“Well, don't
tell him that,” I say. “Let me and Go
rd break the news to him.”

Milgenberger cheerfully agrees to
that, and listens while I explain Junior's antics
to him. Junior, meanwhile, is still in Lulu-land,
bouncing up and down on the table like a chimpanzee.

“Have Geezo put an icebag on the swelling,” Milgenberger
says, serious again. “There's an outside chance of a
subdural haematoma, and maybe a skull fracture. I'll send an
ambulance over to get him.” He explains that he's
still got to put JoMo's nose back together, but that
he'll keep a sharp eye on Junior once he gets to the hospital. W
e hang up.

As we troop back to the ice from
the dressing room, I catch Wendel's eye. He actually smiles at me.

THE THIRD PERIOD
IS
a blast. I'm not just able to tune in
on Wendel's tempo, my own game jumps up a gear to follow it. A couple of minutes in, Gord straight-arms
one of the Ratsloff twins and Godin calls him
off for elbowing. As he skates to the penalty box, I tell him that W
endel and I will kill the penalty.

“You?” he asks. “You don't kill penalties.”

“Why the hell not?” I say. “Can't be an old man all my life.”

“Suit yourself,” he answers, and,
shaking his head, clambers into the box.

Wendel scores two shorthanded
goals in the first forty seconds. Both times I
hit his stick with blind passes while he's in full
flight, one of them after using a fake stumble move
to sucker the Roosters' defenceman into committing to me. The game
is tied, and I feel like I could play the
rest of the game without coming off the ice.

I don't,
but on the next shift I catch Neil Ratsloff
cruising over our blueline, veering toward the slot
with his head down, believing that he's invulnerable. I decide to
go for it. I put my hip into his
thigh and suddenly two hundred and fifteen pounds of beef
sausage is flying over my head. I haven't laid a
hit like that on anyone in ten years, and
to tell the truth it feels kind of good: even
though I caught Neil in the same spot JoMo caught
Jack, I did it within the rules. Godin was leaning
against the glass at the blueline when I did it, and he didn't even blink.

Even Neil recognizes that it was
clean. As he gets to his feet he points a
finger at me and grins. I'm going to have to
keep my head up around him for a couple
of games because, no matter what protection I may have
been under before, I just gave him a licence, and we both know it.

I
don't have to wait long, either. He catches me
in the corner on the next shift and gives
me the crunch. I'm back on my feet before
he's five feet away, and except for one quick, sharp pang in the middle of my chest, I'm none the worse for it.