The Last of the Lumbermen (17 page)

EIGHTEEN

P
ALE WINTER SUNLIGHT IS
streaming through the windows
when I resurface from whatever it was Gor
d squirted into my arm. The twenty-four-hour wall clock
claims that it's seven in the morning, the sunlight
and the unfamiliar windows tell me I'm in one of
the wards, but it isn't until I roll
over that I discover why I'm awake. Gord is
standing beside my bed, staring at me. I don't
think he's been there all night, but somehow I'm
not surprised to see him. The irritation is gone f
rom his face, but he looks tired, and
that reminds me that I'm not the only patient on his caseload.

I don't recall much after the sedative
— bits and pieces of a gurney ride to X-ray,
and later a moment when Gord pressed his
big fingers into my chest around my breastbone.
Even the load of painkiller he gave me couldn't suppress
the pain of that. But otherwise, there's nothing. Not even dreams, good or bad.

“I'm
afraid,” he says, answering my question before I can
ask it, “you're going to live.”

“What does that mean?” I want to
know, still feeling groggy. “For how long?”

“There's absolutely
nothing wrong with your heart, except that it's as black
and evil as it ever was,” he answers. “What you
were experiencing were esophageal spasms brought on by a severely cracked sternum. Probably a present from Mr
. Bellado on Friday night.”

“Bastard,” I mumble.

“Well, there's another
explanation, actually. None of these festivities would have
been necessary if you'd admitted you were hurt on
Friday night. We also uncovered,” he adds, “a r
easonably serious concussion. You might have mentioned that as well.”

“You know how it goes,” I sa
y. “I had a few other things on my mind.”

“So
I understand,” he says, coolly. “Esther and I had
a long talk after I figured out what your
medical problem was. How does it feel to have that cat out of its bag after all these years?”

It seems appr
opriate to play this with caution. “Which cat are you talking about?”

Gord throws up his hands — a danger
ous gesture in these cramped quarters — and sighs. “I've
known as long as Esther has.”

I can't quite integrate this
piece of information, so I change the subject. “Where is she?”

“Here
within the hour, I'd imagine. She didn't leave until
nearly four, but I can't see her staying away
much more than a few hours. I think,” and
here his expression lightens, “she's quite fond of you.”

“Right now I don't feel as if I deserve it.”

“Maybe
it's time to start earning it a little more.
Make some changes.”

Before I can think of an answer
— there isn't one, really, and we both know it — he shifts topic.

“Speaking
of changes, I've got a few temporary ones you're
going to have to make.”

“No more hockey, right?”

He nods his head. “That's one of them.”

“For how long?”

“Not as long as you deserve. A few weeks, maybe more. But that's fine, because we're going to
need a coach. And a
GM
, until Jack is back on his feet.”

“How is he?”

Gord
shakes his head. “If I let Milgenberger operate on
Jack he might never walk again.”

“Is Milgenberger that much of quack? I
always thought he was okay.”

“He is okay, for
a
GP
. It's Jack's knee that isn't okay.
I'm having him flown to the coast.”

“What about Junior?”

“Oh, he'll be okay. Nasty scar is
about all. It isn't like there was a
whole lot of grey matter to damage in the
first place. But he's gone for a week, maybe two. Hard to tell with a concussion.”

“We're going to need players,” I say.

“Yes indeed. I think that's what a general manager is for.”

WHILE I WAIT FOR
Esther, I go over the
list of things I've kept from her.
It isn't as long as it is fundamental: my identity
, my finances, and, tied to my identity, where and what I did after I left Chilliwack.

I'll put them together
for you. After I left Chilliwack I slingshotted acr
oss the continent to the Florida Keys, and sat on
the beach staring at the ocean for a few months. A
round the time the money began to run out,
I realized my blood was too thick for t
ropical climates or for loafing around, and I headed
north along the east coast. I stopped in New Br
unswick, wangled a new social insurance card as Andr
ew Bathgate, and picked up work driving cab.

I let the first
winter go by without hockey, but in the end
I couldn't live without it. By the time hockey season r
olled around I was playing in a semi-pro
league that spanned the border. Things being what
they were in those days — the end of
the Vietnam War — I jumped to an American team
in the loop halfway through the season, got
myself a green card, and went to work for a development company in Maine while I worked on getting my r
ealtor's licence.

After that I worked my way west through
New York State, Ohio, and into Michigan and Wisconsin.
It was pretty slow progress, maybe because
the scars inside my head didn't heal on their own.
I felt like a leper, and my only real
insight then was that I ought to keep to myself and steer clear of entanglements.

Things started to come a
round in Wisconsin five or six years after I left
Chilliwack. I went out and got myself an “A” licence
and spent a winter doing exactly what frightened me most:
I drove other human beings — school children, actually
— in a school bus exactly like the one
I drove that night. I'm sure you get
the picture.

After that I went back to land assembly
and development, mostly in small towns or in the
suburbs of bigger cities in the Midwest. The money was good,
the risks minor, and there was nobody
interesting enough to get tangled up with. I took
a few college courses, too. Some urban planning and architectu
re to help me at work, but also a
little philosophy, and some psychology and history. Those ones
kept me from thinking that the world is as
narrow and stupid as real estate makes it look.

My only other requirement — not
hard to fill — was a decent amateur or semi-p
ro team to play hockey for. By the time
I left the States I had an easily transferable realto
r's licence, and a quarter million bucks to invest. The
success with real estate isn't as impressive
as it may sound. In the markets of the late
'70s and early '80s a chimpanzee could have amassed that kind
of grubstake, and the industry was full of people who couldn't outwit a chimp.

Back across the bo
rder I skipped from Winnipeg to Saskatoon, then northeast
to Edmonton, and I started to recognize my final destination.
I wasn't sure why but I was going home,
to Mantua. I highballed for two-and-a-half years in Edmonton's quiet
market, brought my grubstake beyond a half million, and I was ready.

I arrived in Mantua at exactly the right moment. The local economy was in trouble, but the
province was being flooded with offshore money
from the Japanese and the Hong Kong Chinese. While
I was qualifying for local accreditation (a process
that amounted to learning how not to look
like
a monkey) I put together several parcels of industrial land
north of the city and then flipped them to a
Japanese consortium for double what I'd paid. Two years later
the consortium noticed the dark clouds forming over Mantua, and I
reclaimed both parcels under my original cost. After that
I sold one to a Korean chopsticks manufacturer
who went broke four months after his plant started
up, and the other to a panicky Hong Kong doctor
who gave it back to me with a two-hundred-grand
profit when he decided that the Red Chinese were
turning soft pink and weren't going to execute all
the capitalist lackeys who remained in the P
rotectorate after they took it back from the British.

After that I quit,
and invested my ill-gotten gains in T-Bills. Right now I
don't even have an office, and only my bank man
ager and Jack have any idea what I'm worth. The
taxman comes around once in a while, but Canadian
tax law being what it is all I have to do
is scratch myself in front of the auditors, unloosen
a few flakes, and off they go.

Does that make sense? To me, it
does and it doesn't. I made a life, I made mone
y, I played hockey. That makes sense because
the alternative — doing nothing — hasn't ever appealed to
me. But the system I worked with doesn't make any sense
to me at all. The only real work I've done
in the twenty years since I became Weaver Bathgate, the
only work that actually helped anyone, was the winter
I spent driving the school bus in Wisconsin. And outside
of a couple stints driving taxi early on, that job
was the most poorly paid I've had.

As far as I can see, there
was just one thing that separated me from a thousand
other clowns who lost their shirts in real estate. I
made it because I had just enough brains not to
show around. I didn't buy any Mercedes 450 SLs after I made deals, I didn't wear silk suits, and, most of all, I didn't party.
Very little booze, no dope, no nose candy. I
don't want to sound puritanical, but I think that bus accident sobered me up about a lot of things.

After I killed those four people, including my two closest
friends, I couldn't get drunk. For a while I
tried — mostly in Florida right after it happened — but
the only things booze released in me were waking
nightmares about what I'd done. Sooner or later I'd
find myself reliving the sight of Mikey Davidson's head bouncing
on the pavement.

Sure, I'll have a beer once in a while,
or open a bottle of decent wine with dinner.
But since the day I ran that bus off
the road I haven't gotten loaded on anything. Not alcohol,
not women, not money or real estate. I figure
I owe it to the world to be able to
see what's coming down the road. Or, at the
very least, to be playing with a full deck when it comes at me.

Maybe seeing people die because
of what I did gave me perspective, I dunno.
Like I said, I'm not one of those Safety Nazis
who do everything by the rules, and I'm not what
you'd call a total-philosophy-of-life kind of person the way Gord is.

One thing I've figured
out is that covering ourselves with all these private rights
to protect ourselves from the government and all these
corporations who are trying to turn us into dopes
and slaves and automatons doesn't work. I mean, things have
gotten pretty nutty lately, with everyone thinking their ancestors
are more real than their neighbours and bullying
other people over things that happened two hundred years
ago, or people wanting equal pay and equal access to this
or that, public rights to private property, and
private rights to shoot the public when they tres
pass. It just gets us fighting amongst ourselves. You end
up calling everybody “Your Honour” in public, and thinking
of everybody as “motherfucker” in private. And meanwhile, the rich get richer.