The Last of the Lumbermen (19 page)

TWENTY

I
DROP JACK'S PACKED BAG
at the
top of the stairs and unlock the office so
I can type up the insurance release on his
aging
IBM
Selectric. I've got most of the phrasing in
my head: name, address, and so forth. I'll
adapt the limited liability clause from the releases
we've all signed as players. What that says, basically,
is that neither the Mohawk Hockey Club nor the
City of Mantua is liable for damages or loss of
income resulting from injury, and that a
player can't sue the Club or the City for general
or punitive damages resulting from his or other
players' actions. Of course, if the Coliseum roof
falls in during a game and kills us — always
a possibility in Mantua — or some other equally g
ross instance of facility operator incompetence occurs, we have
the same rights as anyone else. Our heirs can
sue them, and wait until hell freezes over for the courts to rule that we'
re to blame for everything.

Somewhere along the line I learned to touch
type, so putting together the release form doesn't take very
long. I use Jack's fax machine to make a couple
of copies, slip them into my briefcase, and I'm off
to the hospital to deliver the bag and traveling clothes.
The entire operation has taken just forty-five minutes.

It takes a few minutes to locate Jack at
the hospital. I assumed he'd been sent up to one
of the wards the way I was, but Gord has kept him in emergency, probably as a
way of keeping him mindfucked until he's on the
plane. Gord isn't pleased to see me with the bag.

“Jesus
Murphy, Weaver,” he scowls. “I hope Esther didn't
let you pack that thing.”

“She had a bunch of appointments,” I answer.
“Who else was there?”

“Anyone but you. You're
not supposed to lift anything for two weeks. Are you taking those pills I gave you?”

I've
forgotten them at home, but I pat my hip
pocket anyway. “Right here,” I lie.

“Show me,” he says. “You're due for one just about now.”

I start fumbling in my pockets. “Uhhmm …”

“I thought
so. Listen. You've got to use those things exactly on
schedule, or your chest is going to keep seizing
up on you. And if you have another seizure
here and I'm not around, you're liable
to wake up and find Milgenberger's t
reated you to a heart transplant.”

“Yeah, yeah, I
know. And he'll probably just jam it up
my ass, right?”

I've made a homosexual allusion, for Christ's
sake. Worse than that, Gord picks up on it
instantly. The look on my face must have given me away.

It's a ridiculous situation. I go off to pack
a bag for a close friend, and when I come back
there's about two thousand things I can't tease him
and another close friend about anymore. I mean, let's be
blunt. I'm surprised to find out that Jack and Go
rd are gay, but really, it
doesn't change anything. They're still my two closest friends.
On the other hand, this is a small town, and
if Jack and Gord wanted people to know about it
they'd have gone public. The really silly thing about it
is that just as I've unloaded my biggest secret,
I have to put up with theirs. I giggle out
loud at the thought.

“I'm glad you're finding life so amusing,” Gord says, and strides away, I assume to get me a muscle relaxant. Or some arsenic.

“Anyone talked to Junior yet this morning?” I ask Jack.

“He's upstairs someplace. Milgenberger wants to keep him under
observation for a couple of days, and I think it's
a good idea.”

I pull the insurance release form from
my briefcase and drop it in front of him. “How's that look to you?”

A shrewd
look crosses his face as he reads it.
“It's fine. But listen. I've got an idea for you. Why
don't you get Milgenberger to tell Junior he can't
play for six weeks unless he's wearing protection.
Meanwhile, you go down to Wally's and pick up that
mask I've had sitting there for the last two
years. We might be able to make a goalie out of Junior yet.”

“You've had a mask ready for two years?”

“Sur
e. I've been waiting for a puck to whack him
this hard ever since Blacky Silver crushed his cheekbone
three years ago. I've even had Wally paint the
goddamned mask in fleshtones, so Junior can pretend it's just part of his face.”

“I'll do what I
can. But I ain't taking side bets Junior will go
for a mask.”

“Just talk about how good young Stan was looking,”
Jack grins. “That might soften him up. But make sur
e Gord doesn't get wind of this. You know how he is. Oh yeah. One more thing.”

“What?”

“W
ell, I was talking to Old Man Ratsloff last
night before the Roosters left. He mentioned that Artie Newman
is shacked up with some babe over in West Camelot.
You might want to drive down there and see if you can talk him into playing for us the rest of the
season. The Old Man said he tried to get Artie
to play with the Roosters, but Artie pulled some routine
about not wanting to upset his father.”

“The lad is deluding himself.
Alpo is offended because Artie breathes oxygen, not because he might play for some out-of-town team.”

“Go talk to him,” he says. “First thing Monday.”

Gord returns, tosses me a smaller vial of pills
than the first one, and sits on the edge of Jack's bed.

“Time to get ready
, pal,” he says. “Plane's leaving at one-fifteen.”

I tell them
I've got to go, wish Jack luck, and ask him,
as an afterthought, if he has any more instr
uctions about running the team in his absence. He tells
me there's an envelope in his desk drawer at the
Coliseum with a list of all the things that need
to be taken care of.

“Try not to mess up too
bad,” he laughs. “Gord will be watching you.”

“Take that muscle
relaxant before you go,” Gord adds.

I open the vial and pop the
blue and white capsule into my palm, then into my mouth.
“Done,” I say. “These aren't going to fuck up my head, ar
e they?”

“No more than usual.”

Okay, I deserved that one. “Be serious,”
I say. “I can drive the car, right?”

Gord
pauses to think. “Go ahead,” he says. “You should
be okay if you don't start popping them like they're candy.”

I PARK THE LINCOLN
in the usual
spot at the Coliseum, and hoof it over to
the Alexander Mackenzie Inn through the new Civic Centre
complex. “New” isn't the right word for the complex
because it isn't really new, and, if we
were being precise, the only thing complex about
it is whatever motivated City Council to tear down half
of the old Centre just because they wanted to
get rid of the city's disreputable boxing club. Once
they had what they wanted, though, they realized they'd
created an eyesore. So they added a few meeting
rooms and tatted the whole thing up with cheesy i
ronwork, series lighting, and walkways made of concrete
pavers. Now, if the old folks going to bingo
night are senile enough they think they're in Las Vegas.

The ironwork and the lights weren't the worst of it, either. No one told the architect he was
building on a land-filled slough, so he gave the walkway
contractor normal specs for the foundations. Of course, the
contractor cut corners and put down five centimetres of
crushed rock instead of the twenty it needed. The
whole damned network of walkways turned into an obstacle course when
the first spring thaw buckled everything, and a few dr
unk old-timers tripped on the popped-up pavers and broke
their hips. Eventually they'll have to tear up the enti
re mess and asphalt it like they do everything
else, but not until the injury lawsuits are through
the courts. And since the frost boils keep popping
the pavers, and the Civic Centre walkways are
just a lurch out of the direct route
between the town's two biggest bars, the lawsuits will probably go on forever.

I
get across the pavers without breaking an ankle
and arrive at the Alexander Mackenzie coffee bar, just
as the courier finishes passing around the text of
the Cabinet report. As the Minister mouths platitudes from
the wall-mounted television, the room begins to buzz with outrage.
The hoped-for harvest cuts are announced pretty much as
Wendel predicted, but a special addendum to the r
eport that the Minister isn't going to mention at the p
ress conference, and won't take questions on, designates a
huge area for salvage cutting.

Everyone in the room knows what “salvage cutting”
means. About thirteen years ago the same designation was given to
another area southeast of Mantua, just north of the
Bowron Lakes Provincial Park. By the time the salvage
operations were over the multinationals had created the
largest clearcut on the planet, one that the Fo
rest Service admits is fifty-three square kilometres
in size, and which, along with the Great Wall
of China, is supposedly one of the two manmade objects
visible from outer space with the naked eye.

Gord and
I camped out in the clearcut a couple of
times several years ago, and it didn't take any rocket
science for us to figure out that the clearcut
is a lot larger than the one they admit to. Maybe it was the hundred-metre swaths of old timber
separating the primary clearcut from the secondary ones that
gave it away. Or maybe it was because it looked more barren than the Gobi Desert.

I pull
a coffee from the urn by the door
, plunk some sugar and cream into it, and
sit down at one of the tables near the back
of the room. Wendel has moved to the podium,
and he's talking about the Bowron clearcut.

“When the Bowron valley
was designated for salvage,” he says, “they claimed it started with
a patch of blowdown at the heart of the valley
in the early 1970s. This was followed by
a couple of mild winters, which supposedly set off a
spruce budworm infestation in the area of
the blowdown. Most of the valley was what the For
est Service calls ‘over-mature.' In reality, the
valley was what a forest ought to be —
a full community of plants and animals, dominated, in size and
wood volume, by trees that aren't getting any
younger, and which, in the next three or
four decades may — or may not — die and fall on their own.

“I don't need to remind anyone
here of what salvage logging, multinational style, does,” he
continues, his voice rising to oratory pitch. “They move in massive
amounts of equipment, and they flatten everything in the designated
area under the pretense that a public and ecological
service is being rendered. The Forest Service won't
admit this, but when the multinationals ‘salvaged' the Bowron
valley, they used the bug infection smokescreen to
enlarge the cut area as the clearcut g
rew. Does that surprise anyone? The companies had their
equipment on site, the profits were huge, and they owned the government.”

One
of the academics leaps to his feet to point out
that the current government is supposed to be
a social democratic one — the kind that isn't supposed to let this sort of thing happen.