The Last of the Lumbermen (15 page)

ABOUT MIDWAY THROUGH THE
third, Wendel
scores again, this one all on his own, and
two or three shifts later Gord sends the
two of us in on a two-on-one. I get to bury
this one in the upper right corner, after an
Alphonse and Gaston routine that has the Rooster defenceman's head spinning.

The final
score is seven-six for us. Wendel has five
goals and an assist, and I've got a goal and
four. Not bad for a game that started off looking as if we wer
e going to get eaten.

As we're headed off the ice I have
a sudden generous instinct, no doubt brought on
by having won the game. I spin around on my
skates and gaze up into the departing crowd to
see if the kid is still there.

He is, sitting by himself
as if waiting for someone. I wave my stick
at him again. This time he hesitates, as if he
thinks maybe this is it, that now I'm going to
make his brains squirt out of his ears. I grin
to assure him it's okay, and he leaps
across the benches to stand atop the boards as before.

“Hey, kid,” I say
, making it up as I go along. “You
come to all the games, right?”

“Yes,” he answers. “Every one.” Ther
e's no smartass “sir” tagged onto it.

“How'd you like to be our
stickboy? You'd get to see the games for free,
and you'd have the best seat in the place.” And,
I say to myself, it might get you off my case.

For a second, his eyes light
up. Then I see a calculating look cross them.

“Can I practise with the players?”

“Why not?
Sure. You keep the sticks in good or
der, pack some equipment around for us, and
you can do whatever you want. Be here Tuesday night at five.”

For a moment
I think he's going to leap over the boards into my arms.

SIXTEEN

Y
OU'D HAVE THOUGHT WE'D
just won the Stanley Cup
the way the guys whoop it up in the d
ressing room. The beer box empties in thirty seconds,
and, while they're not pretending it's champagne
and squirting it over one another's heads or talking
about going off to Disneyland, the joy is palpable.
When I look around and see that every
player under thirty-five — Wendel included — has
a Molson's stuck down his throat, it's simple to
predict what's next: Chinese food and a major league
parking lot puke-o-rama. Stan Lagace, with his first Senior
win, is so high he's bouncing off the ceiling.

I'm p
retty pleased myself, and so is Gord. But we've
got Jack and Junior in the hospital, and that comes
before any celebrating. As the players start to stream
out, I grab Bobby Bell by the collar and jerk him into Jack's office.

“Keep your
eye on Stan, will you?” I say. “He's underage,
and we don't want him getting mouthy and having
someone beat the shit out him. We've got two
games next weekend, and from the way Junior was looking
we're probably going to need him for a while.”

Bobby reluctantly
agrees to chaperone Stan, and off he
goes with the little goalie in tow. I call the hospital to tell them we're on our way, and as I'm leaving the office I
see Wendel still walking around the dressing room, half-dressed.

“A
ren't you going with them?” I ask. “We don't
beat the Roosters every day.”

“Nah, I've won hockey games before,
you know?” he explains. “Besides, I'm pretty bagged. Mind
if I come up to the hospital with you guys?”

“Suit yourself,” I answer, mor
e pleased than I let on.

Esther comes in as the last players leave. “You
guys were something else tonight,” she says, cheerfully.

“Weren't we?”
I agree. “We haven't beaten those suckers in
a coon's age.”

“Ready to get out of here?”

I've still got my equipment to clean up,
and since Jack isn't here it'll be up to
me or Gord to help Geezo bag the uniforms
so they can go to the cleaners. I decide to do
it myself — Gord will have other matters to
attend to, like making sure we've got our shar
e of the gate receipts.

Esther helps me stuff the uniforms
into the big transparent plastic bags, chattering away at me
as she does. I only half listen, because as
I lean over one of the benches to pick up
a sweater something grabs me around the ribs and
squeezes. At first I think it's Gord fooling ar
ound, but he doesn't let go, and it isn't him.
Then it changes again. This time three or four
hot steel rods are being rammed into my chest. I try to take a breath but can't.

I'm having a goddamned
heart attack
. It's an unbelievable thing to think, so
I don't. Then the rods go deeper, and I
change my mind. Oh, shit, I think. No. Not me.

I lift one knee up onto a bench,
lean on it, and try not to move, hoping it'll
go away. My brain continues to insist that nothing
is happening, but my body doesn't believe it. I still haven't
gotten a breath, but I'm determined to not
let anybody see it. If I'm going to kick the
bucket, I'm going to hold the pose until I keel
over. No writhing around on the floor or whining for divine intervention. I may not have lived my
life with enough dignity, but I damned well want to die with a little.

It occurs to me that
my life is supposed to be passing before my eyes,
but it isn't. The only visuals I'm getting are
of the concrete floor in front of
me, and there's no soundtrack at all. Maybe I'm too
busy fuming about the lousy timing: this is wrong,
the wrong moment to be dying. I've just found
out I have a son, and instead of dying in f
ront of his mother I ought to be getting married
to her, and now, goddamn it to hell,
I'm not going to be able to …

As abruptly as it
appeared — whatever “it” is — it lets up. The
vise gripping my chest lets go enough to let me
get a breath, the hot steel rods pull
back. I suck in some air and release it.
I can literally taste the oxygen.

There's another, more tactile sensation.
Esther's hand is on my shoulder. “Are you okay?”

I straighten
up and shrug. “Fine. My back just gave me
a little twinge there.”

She's eyeing me. “Really?”

“Really,” I insist. “Let's go see Jack.”

WE TAKE THE LINCOLN
,
and using the sore back excuse I ask Esther to drive. Go
rd and Wendel climb into the rear seats.

“I love this car,” Gord
says. “It's damn near the only kind left I can sit
in the back seat of without it feeling like it's
going to flip over on top of me.”

“Yeah,” Wendel agrees, “and
if you were any bigger I'd have to sit on your knee.”

“W
ell,” Gord laughs, “it wouldn't be the first time.”

In the front passenger seat, I'm having a
hard time listening. Bubbling from the memory of
those steel rods — despite my efforts to stay
in control — is panic, and a weird
sort of shame. I've always been one of those people who sails through injury and pain as if it's nothing special — broken
bones, sprained joints, that sort of thing. But this isn't an
injury
, and, worse, I can't see it because it's inside
me. If it was a heart attack, it could have
just been a warning shot across the bow,
a minor tremor. The real one, the big
one that's going to do me, might arrive any second.

Esther
keeps on glancing at me suspiciously as she drives. I'm thankful
that the already-fading light isn't giving her much. I
keep my face averted, looking out the window, until
we reach the parking lot outside the hospital emergency
ward. At least we're in the right place if the big cranker comes.

Comforted by that
thought, I pull myself together as Esther glides the Lincoln into
a parking spot. It isn't a huge effort to
get myself out of the car, and that's
comforting too. Maybe I'll be okay.

I keep up, bar
ely, as the four of us hustle to the
emergency ward's entrance. We all know the nurse
on the desk by name — the emergency staff
are used to seeing Mohawk players in here
after games — and since she's expecting us she waves
us in the direction of one of the cubicles,
without bothering with any chit-chat.

Jack is composed and still, so
drugged that even speaking is tricky. Now that
the hockey game is over Gord is willing to
be a doctor again, and he doesn't have time for small
talk. He busies himself with the X-rays Milgenberger left
for him on the bedside trolley and leaves the bedside comforting to me.

Jack's damaged knee is
raised slightly above the bed in a traction sling. It
doesn't look shredded from the outside, just bloated.
It occurs to me that my heart might have the
same appearance.

“You don't look so bad,” I say, dousing that last thought and giving the bed a small test nudge. “I was expecting a corpse.”

“Check inside my knee, there,” he mumbles.

“I'll leave the autopsy to Gord. Where did they put Junior?”

“Couple of stalls down,” Jack answers, ignoring the attempt at pla
y. “Pretty noisy when they brought him in.
And stop pushing on the bed, you nitwit. It moves
fine, but my knee is strapped to the ceiling.”

He closes his
eyes, and Gord elbows me out of the way
. “I'll go check on Junior,” I say, and slip through the curtain.

I find Junior thr
ee stalls away, his forehead swathed in ban
dages, the eye beneath it puffed and starting to
discolour. He's stopped babbling and jumping around, but he's
still a few sandwiches short of a picnic.
He's also a lot uglier than Jack, but it's hard to get a bead on how hurt he
really is.

While I'm questioning him, or trying to, a nurse
slips into the cubicle, checks his eyes, and makes small
talk. Junior tries to paw her aside, wanting — now
that he realizes it's me in the cubicle with him — to know how the game went.

“We won,”
I tell him, carefully nonchalant. “Seven-six. We got some lucky goals.”

“How did Lagace do?”

“He did fine,” I say, holding the pose. “He
made a few saves, but he didn't really have much to do.”

Junior recognizes that I'm
lying to him. “Don't you try to shit me, Weaver
,” he says. “If they only scored two goals
in two periods, that little horse's ass must have been doing cartwheels.”

“Stan's just a dumb kid,” I answer,
cutting through the bullshit to his real question. “You're our goalie.”

Gord
and Wendel slip into the cubicle, and Wendel pr
omptly sticks his foot in it.

“It isn't that Stan's so great,” he says.
“It's that you're so lousy.”

Gord clears his
throat to stifle what looks suspiciously to me
like laughter. “What he's saying is that if you
wore a mask you'd be a better goalie than Stan is.”

Wendel jams the other foot in.
“Right,” he says. “Why don't you wear a goddamned mask? If you did, you wouldn't be here and we wouldn't be telling you this.”

“It's a tradition,” Junior answers. “I can't break that.”

“Being stupid is a tradition?” Wendel hoots. “Since when?”

I can't help myself. “Around her
e? Since about 1792. We have a God-given right to be stupid and ignorant.”

Go
rd gives me a dirty look. “Well, you know
how it goes, Junior,” he says. “Traditions ar
e supposed to make your life better and deeper.
If they don't, it seems to me that you're
free to get rid of them. When your old
man started playing hockey, there was no such thing
as goalie masks. Now there is. You wouldn't
be any less a man if you used one. Just a better goalie.”

Junior's eyes glaze over. “My
old man would never let me live it down.”

Gord isn't
having any of it. “Screw your old man. He
would have been a better goalie if he'd started using a
mask. And he might have lasted longer, too.”

Junior is starting to whine. “What
about you? You don't wear headgear.”

Gord laughs.
“They don't make helmets big enough. I can't help it if
the manufacturers think hockey players are all pinheads.
I'd love to be able to wear one. I'd probably wear a visor if I could.”

“I dunno if
that's
such a good
idea,” I interject. “If you had a visor you'd stop
murdering those jerks who come at you with their sticks up. What would become of the rest of us?”

“Maybe you're right,” Gord admits. “Someone has to
take care of you pussies.”

Esther, who has been listening thr
ough the curtain without entering, leans in. “Hey, you guys,”
she says, “the Ratsloffs just arrived. Maybe you ought
to stay inside the curtain there until they've gone.”

“I guess
I really ought to apologize to JoMo,” Gord says,
and slips out. The truth is, the Ratsloffs
aren't too bad off the ice unless they've been
drinking. I follow Gord over to the cubicle, whe
re they're crowding around JoMo, laughing and joking.