The Last of the Lumbermen (16 page)

JoMo, when I catch sight of him, does look pretty funny. He's got a tin snozzle over his ruined
nose, held there by twin stripes of thick white
tape that end at his jowls and his hairline. A
pair of spectacular shiners are blooming around his eyes.
In a few days, they'll be glorious. From each
of his nostrils hang fuses of cotton batting, there
to hold the cartilage in place from the inside.
Good thing snot isn't flammable. Even his own kin would have
trouble keeping themselves from putting a match to
those fuses and blowing up JoMo's remaining brains.

It's hard to tell if JoMo is
pissed off or not. He isn't talking — he's
had his nose broken before, and knows that
one word from him will have his relatives
honking and huffing in imitation. He and Gord simply nod to one another.

“Sorry I caught you on the beak,” Gord says.

In
answer, JoMo shakes his head once and shrugs.
Part of the game, he's saying. A couple of
the Ratsloffs nod to me as I stop to pay
my respects to JoMo. I don't have much to
say to him except “Tough break,” which he
accepts with an expression that could be a smile.
None of the Ratsloffs ask about Jack. That's part of the game too, as far as they're concerned.

ON THE WAY OUT
I mention to Jack that
I appointed the kid stickboy, and he goes through the roof.

“You
can't do that without an insurance release,” he scolds when
he calms down. “If the little bugger gets nailed by
a puck on the bench his parents would end up owning half the city.”

Sounds reasonable to me, but
there's a simple solution. “Where are you hiding the release forms?”

Maybe
it's because we're talking about money and printed forms,
but Jack is suddenly very coherent. “They don't exist.
You have to make one up.”

“What does it have to say?”

“I dunno. The kid's name and address
at the very least, and a couple of sentences about how he's there at his own risk and with his parents' consent. And you have to get one
of his parents to sign it.”

“I've got his name. No address, though.”

“What is that
kid's name, anyway?” Jack asks. “He's been at every game
in the last two years. I always see him ther
e, but there never seems to be anyone with him.”

“His last name is the same
as mine: Bathgate. Wonder if we're related.”

“Well,”
Jack answers, his head sinking back on the pillow,
“he's got one hell of a mouth on him, so I wouldn't be surprised.”

I feel someone's hand on my elbow. It's
Esther, waving the car keys at me. “Time we
got out of here,” she says. “I'll stop by
and see you tomorrow, dear.”

“Come and see me at my
apartment,” Jack answers. “I'm not letting them hold me in
here overnight. People die in hospitals. Ask Gord.”

Esther stops me in the lobby. “Ar
e you sure you're all right?”

I insist that I am. She puts her
palm to my forehead, and frowns.

“You're too pale for my liking,” she says. “I'll drive.”

I don't argue.

SEVENTEEN

G
ORD STAYS AT THE
hospital with Jack —
probably all night, knowing him — so Esther and
I have only Wendel for a passenger on the way back to the Coliseum.

We
say our goodbyes — I'm half-convinced they'll be last
goodbyes — and let him out near the arena's
already-darkened front doors.

“Are we in any hurry?”
I say as we watch Wendel make his way to Esther's t
ruck.

She flips the limo into drive. “No, not reall
y. You have some- thing in mind?”

“Let's take the scenic route,” I say.

She can't help herself. “What scenic route?”

I
laugh despite myself, because she's right. Less than twentyfour
hours after the snowstorm ended, the usual combination of fly-ash
from the sawmill burners and airborne sulphur from
the pulp mills has fouled everything. Downtown Mantua already looks like someone pissed on it.

She pushes the gearshift back to park, pumps the gas
pedal, and waits. “Well?”

“Turn off the car,” I tell her. “Let's go inside for a moment.”

“You don't have a key,” she objects, sensibly not wanting to walk around to the back doors where the
commercial leaguers come and go.

“I've got Jack's keys. There's something
in the lobby I have to show you.”

“
Have to
?” she asks.

“Want to,”
I say, then amend it again. “Need to. Y
ou need to know this.”

We walk to the door, and
I slide Jack's key into the lock. The genius who
set up the photo display all those years ago thought
fully rigged it so that the fluorescents inside the
display cases are wired to the main
door, and as the bolt swings back inside the
key door the cases light up. Maybe he thought illuminating
those immortals would help their custodians to remember to lock
the door. Tonight, his small invention is going to
help us perform a more serious act of memory.

I enter the lobby and
stop. Esther steps toward the bank of light switches on the wall.

“No,”
I say. “We don't need any more
light than we've got.”

I guide her, my hand
on her elbow, toward the display case near
est the doors, the one that has the team photo
of the first Chilliwack Christian Lions champions in it. As we
near it I feel her hesitate, but she doesn't pull
back. It takes me only a second to key in on
Billy Menzies, even through the lime green, but
as I catch sight of myself the way I was
twenty-one years ago an alreadyfamiliar tightness grabs at my
chest. I'd better get this out quickly. I may not have time to spare.

I
press my right index figure against the glass
over Billy Menzies. “Do you know who that man is?”

She begins to speak the name, but then
hesitates again, stops. After a moment she clears her voice
and speaks. “That's Wendel's father. His name is …”

“His name is Billy Menzies.”
One of the hot steel bolts slams through
my lungs as I speak the name. “Now look at his face,” I wince, squeezing the words
out as a second bolt rockets through me. “And then look at mine.”

She doesn't
do what I ask. Instead, she looks into my eyes
and sees the pain there, and loses all
interest in what I'm trying to show her. As
a third bolt sears through my chest cavity
I double over, my face against her chest. I
hear a sharp cry of distress escape her,
feel her arms folding around me, and then, fr
om everywhere, there is darkness coming at me,
swift and aggressive. My last two thoughts are that
it hurts like hell, and that I don't want to go.

BUT I WAKE UP
,
and things are pretty much where they
were when I blinked out — the important things,
anyway. Esther's face about eighteen inches from mine.
She's pale and concerned, but oddly I can't read any
fear in her face. Nor, for that matter,
any evidence to suggest that she's figured out what
I was trying to tell her before I keeled over.

Beyond
her, though, the scenery has changed completely. I'm
lying on a hospital gurney, and white-clothed men and
women are scurrying around the periphery of my
vision. I recognize the hospital emergency room, and on
my chest, as I look down, are a series
of electrodes, taped down in an asymmetrical array.
They disappear behind my head, where I assume there
is a machine. There's an
IV
stuck in my
arm, also taped down, and around my waist a canvas restraining belt.

“That was inter
esting,” I say, trying to sound cheerful.

“I can think of several better ways to describe
it,” Esther answers, dryly. “You scared the sweet Jesus out of me.”

“What happened?”

She gestures at
the equipment behind me. “That's what they're trying to find out.”

“How long?”

“What do you mean, ‘how long'?” A familiar twinkle alters her concerned expression. “You've always told me it
was nine inches.”

I try to repress my own laughte
r, can't, and am surprised that it doesn't hurt. “No, I mean how long was I out?”

She shrugs. “About
an hour. Maybe more. You've been doing some very silly things since you got he
re.”

A nurse enters, looking very stern, and motions Esther
out of the way. The nurse fiddles at the
electrodes, pulls a printout from the machine behind
my head, and presses a button. I hear the machine
whirring. She takes my pulse, frowning while she does
it, then pulls the second printout from the machine.

“Try to be still,” she says to
me. To Esther she adds, “Try to keep him f
rom moving around. The doctor will be here in a minute.”

Esther moves back to my side, picks
up my hand, and squeezes it gently. I try
to think of something to say that will comfort
her, but all that's coming to mind is that
I'd die for her. It's true that I
would, but judging from the way she's looking at
me — fondly — it isn't what she has in mind.

“I think it might have been a heart
attack,” I admit. I don't tell her about the one earlier, in the dressing room.

“That's what I thought, too,” she
replies, after a moment.

“What do they think?”

“You know how doctors and nurses are.
They don't think any- thing. They just run tests and write things on pieces of paper.”

If she understands
what I was trying to tell her about myself befor
e I conked out, I can't read it in her
face, just like I can't tell if she knows mor
e about my condition than she's letting on. She's the picture of poke
r-playing calm, as usual.

“I've got something I need to say to you, in case …”

She cuts me off. “Not now. It
can wait until you're stabilized. I want you to
calm down” — here she hesitates — “and stop
acting like a baby.” She leans against the bed and
rests the side of her face against my forearm.
“Gord is going to be here in a minute, and he'll get to the bottom of this.”

“Don't they know what it was?”

“Apparently not,” she answers, peering back to examine the
script coming off the machines behind my head. “Your
EKGS
are normal.”

At least I
did one thing properly. I had a will
done last year, without telling Esther. It makes
her my sole beneficiary, so if I kick she'll get
everything. That's a comfort. And Wendel will get the use of my assets eventuall
y, I suppose.

I blurt it out. “Esther. I'm Billy Menzies.”

“I know,” she says. She doesn't move
her head to look at me, and her voice is flat when she goes on. “I've known all along.”

I feel a su
rge of emotion, somewhere between anger and disappointment. “Why didn't you tell me?”

“I
was waiting for you to tell
me
. I don't
know. I didn't want you to feel burdened. Not by me or by Wendel.”

“Don't be crazy.”

“I'm not,”
she says with a hint of irritation in her voice.
“Look at it from my point of view.
At first it seemed wrong to drop it
all in your lap. I mean, I didn't know what
kind of person you really were, and I didn't
know where you'd been. After that, I wasn't
sure if I loved you or even wanted to
stay with you. So things dragged on. I got caught, that's
all. People don't see everything, you know.
And you kept your cards up pretty damned high.”

I'm dumbfounded. “You know how I feel about you,”
I say. It sounds lame, and she doesn't go for it.

“I know you love me. But I also know you keep secrets.”

“I had to. Or at least I thought I had to. Doesn't everyone?”

“Yes,” she answers.
There is a long silence that's more empty than
tense. “Everyone keeps secrets. Maybe,” she adds, “that's what's wr
ong with all of us.”

We don't get time to talk about it. Go
rd comes in, moving like a cross between a
wrecking ball and a whirling dervish, ordering people out
of the room, including Esther, and demanding to
see test results. It's as if it's not me lying on the table but a medical abstraction, a crisis, maybe an opportunity. I can't read
him at all, but I've rarely seen him this stressed out.

“Not used to dealing with people who aren't dead, I guess?”

“You shut
up,” he answers curtly. “For all we know you
might be dead any second.”

As I watch him peruse the data sheets
the nurse gave him, I see his concern shifting to puzzlement.
“Describe your symptoms to me,” he says. “And no jackassing around.”

I give him the basics,
but it doesn't satisfy him. “Earlier,” he snaps. “What about yesterday
, the day before?”

I don't want to tell him how fucked up
I was after the Friday game, because he'll be
pissed. Then I remember Esther's remark about keeping sec
rets. This doesn't seem to me like much of a
secret, and I'm certain it isn't connected, but I
tell him anyway.

He interrupts me in the middle
of it. “You silly shit,” he says, then hollers
for the nurse, who is standing behind him. “I want X-rays on this man's skull, upper back, and sternum. S
TAT!”

He turns to me. “This
might
not be as
serious as it looks,” he says. “But I'm going to give you something for the pain.”

“There isn't any pain,” I say.

“There
will be if you don't button it and do what
you're told,” he says. I watch him turn to the
nurse and say something I don't catch. She leaves the room.

She returns
seconds later with a small syringe, and hands it to Go
rd. “This,” he says with a grin, “will make you relax.”

I flinch as he punches the needle
into my biceps. “Does this mean I'm not going to die?”

“Who knows?” he answers. “If
you are, I'll try to let you know before your eyeballs roll up for the big plunge.”