The Last of the Lumbermen (22 page)

It's time to spring the mask. “There's
one thing that can save it.” I let the sentence trail
off into silence, as if what's on my mind is just too unthinkable to say out loud.

“What is it?” Junior pulls back the covers and starts
to climb out of bed. “I don't want to have to quit.”

I push him back onto the bed. “W
ell,” I say. “You remember when you got bopped a couple of winters ago up in Okenoke?”

“Yeah,” Junior
says, suddenly much less casual about his head injuries than
ever before in his life — now that his
skull nexus has disintegrated. “That was a doozy.”

“Well, apparently the beginning
of the damage was apparent that time. Milgenberger mentioned
it to Jack,” I say, “and Jack wrote
away to this special clinic in Tulsa Gord knew
about” — I reach beneath my chair and pull out
the death's-head mask — “and had this built for you.”

For a second, it looks as if
Junior is about to dive beneath the bed. Then
a wily look crosses his face. “You lousy
bastard,” he says. “You've been stringing me along, haven't you?”

“Not a word, I swear
,” I tell him. “Cross my heart and hope
to die.”

“There's nothing wrong with me,” Junior snarls.
“And I ain't wearing no goalie mask.”

“You can't play goal again for
the Mohawks without one,” I tell him. “The Coliseum's insurance
company called this afternoon and threatened to cancel the team's insurance.”

I'm blowing more
smoke, of course, and this time Junior knows it
right away. Given the releases we sign, if he
wanted to play with a loaded .45 automatic stuck
in his ear, the insurance company wouldn't give a damn
unless the Coliseum manager had personally filed off the safety and cocked it for him.

“Screw you,” he
says. “I can't play goal with a mask, and
that's final. I may have to sit out this weekend,
but I'll be back the week after. And I won't be wearing any stupid mask.”

A voice fr
om the door interrupts him before he can
launch the tirade against girly men, poufters, and safety f
reaks that's coming next. “I think you should stop being a fool, son, and use the mask.”

Damned if Don Young, Sr. isn't standing in the
doorway. Junior's jaw drops wide open as
the old man steps into the room, nods to
me, and moves close enough to Junior that he can examine
the bandage on his son's forehead. I don't know
how long he's been listening to our conversation, but evidently
it was long enough.

“I must have had a dozen of these
injuries,” he says, dryly. “But nobody thought enough of me
to get me a mask, and I was too
stupid to ask. It's a bloody wonder my brain isn't
more scrambled than it is.”

Junior is still silent. So, for that matter
, am I. The old man makes a fist of
his big hand and uses it to tap Junior on
the shoulder. “Listen,” he says. “You take that
mask and you wear it. I don't want to hear
any more of this manly man horseshit fr
om you. God gave you few enough brains without you
letting the ones you have get turned into Jell-O pudding.”

Mission accomplished. I toss the mask into Junior's
lap and leave his father to lecture him on the merits of safety and hockey masks.

TWENTY-FOUR

A
SMALL JOLT OF
relief rattles up my spine when
I see Jack's pickup parked in the driveway: Esther
hasn't run away to join the circus or
been abducted by aliens. So far, so good. When
I slip my key into the front door lock
and it turns without a hitch, I'm two for two.

It's better
than that, actually. She's cooking my favourite dish, shepherd's
pie. It's the first time she's ever made it, and
I can see she's used my recipe: hamburge
r, carrots, onions, salt, pepper, and a dollop
of ketchup for the sauce, with riced potatoes on top.
I've been cooking the dish since I can remember
, and there are two tricks to it: never
alter the proportions, and don't add any Smarties. No peas, no corn, no ground lamb, no silly spices.

W
ith the news I've got, though, we don't waste time
discuss- ing recipes. I start with the visit to James
Bathgate's mother. Esther doesn't say much, but I
can see she's pleased rather than disturbed. That makes a certain
sense: in her way, Esther has been almost
as isolated as I've been. She lost her mother to
cancer just after Wendel was born, and her father died
in a trucking accident a couple of years after
that. Since Leo was killed Wendel has been her famil
y, along with Gord and Jack. When I came
along I entered a very small circle, and until two days ago I wouldn't have even seen myself as an essential part of it.

Wendel has already told her about the
Coalition meeting, and she's a little skeptical about my of
fer. “Are you really prepared to
give up that property for something that may or
may not work?” she wants to know.

I tell her I am.

“This is about Wendel, isn't it?” she says.

“Sure,” I answer
. “He
is
my son, and I've got to start
some- where with him. You know damned well
he's not going to buy into any lovey-dovey stuff, so
I figure it's got to be something practical. And anyway
, it isn't going to cost me my shirt.”

“You really think an independent scaling yard
has a chance?” It's more a comment than a question.

“Hard to say,” I
admit. “Probably not, unless a lot of people change their
minds about some fairly basic things. But I agree
with what they're trying to do. That Equivalent Value
idea of his makes sense to me.”

“It does to me too, but right
now the world's going in the opposite direction.”

“Yeah,
well, I guess I'm tired of sitting back on
my ass watch- ing the big dogs eating the little
dogs. All this bullshit about survival of the fittest
doesn't do it for me, you know? So I figur
e I ought to stand behind a few things that do.”

“What does it for you, then?”

“Wendel does, when he's not annoying the
crap out of me. A few of those people he's
been working with are trying to make things better
. At least they care about how the things
around us get misused. Seems to me that if we'
re going to run around being impressed by
people taking on difficult things, we ought to be mor
e impressed by those kinds of things and not
by all these jerks who'll chew off a rat's
ass if they think they can make a pr
ofit from it.”

I'm a little taken aback by my own passion,
and Esther sees it. “Well, it's good that you're willing to help. And Wendel was pretty impressed by what you
did. He's coming over for dinner, incidentally.”

No surprise
there. He's as fond of shepherd's pie as
I am. He appears at the back door ninety seconds befo
re the dish comes out of the oven.

“Hi, Andy,” he says
coolly, tossing his mackinaw onto a chair in the
dining room. “Thanks for the push this afternoon. Dunno if
there's enough testicles out there to take you
up on that goofy offer you made, but it was fun watching them squirm.”

“Offer's real,” I
say. “No time limit. It'd be nice if something
changes around here.”

“Man, am I hungry,” he says, smacking
his hands together and sitting down. “Let's eat.”

OVER THE SHEPHERD'S PIE
I
relate my efforts to talk Junior into a goalie
mask, together with the unexpected punchline Don Sr. provided.

“Now all we need to do is get him to
lose twenty-five pounds,” Wendel says, “and we're set.”

“Set for what?”

“For the tournament.”

That's close to the last
thing I want to talk about, so I pull
first-things-first on him and mention that I'm going to drive down
to Camelot tomorrow to see if I can talk
Artie Newman into playing for us.

“Good luck with that,” Esther says. “But
you're two players short, remember? Not one.”

“Hey,” Wendel interr
upts. “I had a thought. How about we pick up Freddy Quaw?”

“
F
reddy
Quaw?” Esther asks, just as I'm about to. I
must know several dozen Quaws — it's the family
name for of the local native band's hereditary chiefs. Esther probably knows at least fifty Quaws, but not, I guess, all of them.

“He any relation to Roddy?” I ask. Roddy Quaw played
for the Mohawks a few years back until the ef
fects of a long string of “minor” logging accidents caught up
with him. Nice guy, and from what
Gord said about him a more than decent
player in his day. Now he's running the
band council, which recently asked for downtown Mantua as part
of their land claim. No one took them very seriously until
they started camping on the lawn in front
of city hall and it took a federal cabinet minister
and a couple million dollars to get them off. Seems
the railroad that originally designed the town site
didn't file some papers in the right filing tray back at
the turn of the century, and there's an
outside chance the whole town is aboriginal land. I
suppose we could just give the place back to them,
but Jesus, I thought we were supposed to
stop
screwing them.

“I think
Freddy is Roddy's nephew,” Wendel says. “The
family sent him to Sault Ste. Marie to play hockey when
he was fourteen, but he stoked some referee just
before Christmas and they suspended him for the
year. He's eighteen this year, so he's eligible
for Senior.”

“Do we want him if he's just a goon?”

Wendel shrugged. “The couple of times I
played against him it looked like he had good skills.
You know they try to turn every big kid into
a goon in Junior. We could just tell him
to play his own game, and see what happens.”

“Well, see if you can
get him out to the practice tomorrow.
It's pretty hard to say how things will
go with Artie Newman. He's a long shot. For all I
know he's had his head stuck inside a beer keg so long his brain has dissolved.”

“You
may not be able to tell him from a
beer keg by now,” Esther says.

“That's entirely possible, too,”
I admit. “But I figure he's worth a look.
Jack's gone for the year, and I can't play
for three or four weeks. And we've been under the player limit all year anyway.”

I'M ON THE HIGHWAY
rolling
south to Camelot by nine the next morning. The cold snap
that started Saturday night is holding, and the temperatur
es are hovering just above minus twenty. That's Fah
renheit, incidentally. Like most people around here,
I never quite converted to Centigrade when Pierre Tr
udeau decided it would be entertainingly anti-American if the country went
metric.

Whatever the temperature is, it's cold enough to
make the snow crisp and tight under the Lincoln's tires,
and soon I'm cruising at one hundred thirty-five
kph. I'd like to be cruising at eighty to eighty-five
miles per hour, but the Lincoln's speedometer doesn't convert.
I really don't know how fast one-thirty-five kph is, except
that it seems fast enough. I've traveled this route so
many times I could drive it in my sleep.

In just over an hour I'm at
the outskirts of Camelot, with the stink of sulphur dioxide
in my nostrils. The town has just a single pulp mill
to Mantua's three, but the Camelot mill's technology —
and maybe its location on the north edge of town
— makes it smell stinkier.

All I've got is a
phone number for Artie Newman. When I phoned the number last
night to warn him I was coming, I got a
machine telling me gruffly to “leave a message, maybe
we'll call you back.” Hence, my itinerary this morning has a
prior stop at the Camelot Ritz Grill. The easiest way
of finding out anything in Camelot is to talk to Lenny
Nakamoto, who makes it his business to know everybody and
everything that's going on in town. He'll know exactly how to find Artie. The trick is to get him to tell me.

I haven't
warned Lenny that I'm coming, but he'll be where
he always is in the morning: sitting at the table
next to the cash register at the Grill, counting
the previous night's bar receipts. He's a man of
habit, Lenny Nakamoto. He'll have the book- keeping done
by a few minutes before ten, so that he
can be the bank's first customer when it opens. From
there he'll head back to the Grill for
breakfast, which he will luxuriate over until tenforty-five, when he'll retreat to the bar for its opening at eleven.

I arrive just as he's about to wolf down the
first of the four rubbery fried eggs on the
plate in front of him. He sees me coming, grins,
and motions me to sit down. I slip into the
booth across from him, tipping my wrist down
to signal the waitress for coffee. It's about the
only thing on this menu I can stomach, but I'm
not going to insult Lenny by telling him that
no one in their right mind would eat in his restaurant. I need his good will.

Let me tell you
just one story about the Camelot Ritz Grill. Sane and sober
folks don't eat there much, but in Camelot, always
a little short on sane and sober, that isn't
a problem. The drunks at the Camelot Ritz
Hotel bar think the Grill is the best place in
the universe, particularly after Lenny boots their asses out
of the bar and tells them to sober up.

They stumble down the hallway to the Grill,
where they drink a coffee or two — and
then order beer by the bottle. It's great
for the drunks, who can sober up
and
get
drunker without leaving the building.

It hasn't been so gr
eat for the Grill's decor. Every few months, things get
out of hand and the place gets trashed. Old Man
Ratsloff gets around to renovating the place every
five years or so, but because he's a cheapskate
he never spends enough to make it look decent. The last
time the café got trashed he gave the renovation job
to JoMo, who'd just bought a router and was into
English Tudor and wormwood. He got hold of a
bunch of unplaned fir four-by-fours and three-by-sixes, chewed wormy
grooves along them with his router, and stained
them as dark as he could. Then he slapped them
over the old arborite surfaces from the last renovation.
To make things worse, JoMo found a couple bolts of
purple-and-puke-coloured naugahyde at some liquidation sale in Vancouver
and used it to redo the cushions. The place looks like it was decorated by Henry VIII while he was on
LSD
.