The Last of the Lumbermen (23 page)

Lenny sees me eyeing the decor while the waitr
ess puts a brown mug of coffee in f
ront of me. “It's not so bad,” he shrugs. “Hides the bloodstains. What brings you to our fair city this morning?”

“I need to find Artie Newman.”

Lenny's guard goes up. “Why the fuck do
you want to find
him
?”

“His old man's real sick,”
I say. It's true, sort of. Alpo i
s a sick puppy. “Somebody has to tell Artie.”

Lenny peers at me skeptically
. “Oh yeah? Why didn't you just phone him?”

“I did. All
I got was a machine. Anyway, that isn't the
kind of news you should put on an answering machine.”

“Sure,” he says. “I believe you. Tell
me you're not trying to sign him to a hockey contract to replace old Jackie-boy.”

I
try to keep my face straight, but Lenny reads
me anyway. Then, unexpectedly his expression softens, and he
reaches for a small black book that's half-hidden under a
manila envelope beside him. He flips it open and passes
it across the table with his index finger pressed over a written address.

“What do I get for this?” he wants to know
.

“It's what you
won't
get.”

“Like what won't I get?”

“Well,” I say, “you won't
get Gord building a nest in your goal cr
ease this Sunday.”

He lifts his finger off the address.
“Fair enough. You got a pen?”

I hand him
my pen. While he's scribbling the address on a napkin, I ask him some questions about
Artie Newman.

“He's been in town for a couple of years
now,” Lenny says, slipping the pen into his shirt
pocket. “Shacked up with a woman I heard he's
been chasing around since he was about fourteen. She's some kind of woman, too.”

“I'm mor
e interested in what kind of shape he's in.”

“Well, he's dry, if that's what you
mean. I never see him around here. To
tell you the truth, the Old Man's been trying
to sign him to play with us since he arrived. No deal. But he's been running the Zamboni on the weekends, actually.”

“What's he do the rest of the time?”

“I dunno. He and his woman — her name's
Elsa, incidentally, and you'd better mind your Ps and
Qs around her — they keep pretty much to
themselves. I think he's got some sort of U.I. pen
sion, and all he does is work on a couple
cars he's got out there. He's a strange duck.”

“Think he can play, still?”

“It's strictly
a question of whether or not he wants to,” Lenny says,
scratching his head. “There ain't no physical problem.
I seen him skate. I went down to the ar
ena after the bar closed — shit, now, it must
have been a month ago — and there's Artie
out on the ice by himself, full equipment, with a
bucket of pucks. So yeah, he's still got it. But getting him to use it ain't going to be easy.”

I finish my cof
fee while we chat about other things, then pull a couple
of loonies from my pocket and tuck them under
the saucer. I'm about to slip the napkin with
Artie's address into my shirt pocket and vamoose when it
occurs to me that Lenny will probably know something about Ron Bathgate.

“What
do you know,” I ask him, “about a guy
named Ron Bathgate?”

Lenny looks up sharply. “Ron Bathgate? He any relation?”

“Distant,” I say. It's t
rue, sort of. Until yesterday I thought he was on the other side of eternity
.

“Makes sense,” Lenny says, with a snigger. “He's a
strange potato, that one.”

“How so?”

“Well, how many guys do you know
who've had the balls to tell InterCon to go screw
themselves. Cost him his mill, I heard. People said
he must have thought he had some aces up his
sleeve that weren't there when whatever game he was
playing got hot, but I never believed that.”

“Tell me more.”

“Oh, Christ, Weaver.
I can't recall the details, except that he was
into the same sort of ecology nonsense your old lady's kid is. I'm sure the two of them
are pumping it in both your ears these days. Anywa
y, I heard Bathgate's living up in your neck
of the woods now. Why don't you ask him about it yourself?”

I get to my feet. “I guess
I'll have to,” I say. “Thanks for the addr
ess.”

“You just keep that walking side of beef out
of my crease like you promised.”

“Okay. But watch
for me when I come off the
DL
.
Just for laughs, of course.”

“At your own risk, Tinkerbell,” Lenny says without looking up. “Catch you later.”

TWENTY-FIVE

T
HE CAMELOT RIVER JOINS
the Fraser just below the bridge over
to West Camelot, but it doesn't do it the
way the Fraser meets the Nechalko River at Mantua. A
few hundred years ago Mantua
was
the two rivers
most of the year, and when it wasn't it was
a field of washed gravel, dotted by islands of cotton
wood crosscut by oxbows and stinking sloughs where
the two river streams flooded across one another
. Back then, the rivers at Mantua were equal st
reams, except that Fraser was a muddy brown and
Nechalko was clear and blue. Then we dammed the Nechalko and
started dumping mountains of shit and debris into it, so that now it's silver-gr
een and half the size it once was.

The way the two rivers behaved was a little like
life was around these parts. They ran over one
another, sprayed gravel and muck into one another's faces,
and didn't apologize for the messes they left behind. I
suppose the way they are now, come to
think of it, is also about right. One half making the
same old mess, and the other half sucking up toxins.

The smaller, sedate Camelot
river isn't much like either of Mantua's rivers — or
like life. It leaves its orderly cottonwoodlined banks sparkling
blue, sidles politely into the murky Fraser, and, within a quarter kilometre, vanishes. I suppose that's how the city of Camelot got its name
— its river is an English gentleman, out of place in
a land of ass-kicking, over-the-banks, debris- littered rivers and cr
eeks.

Not that anyone in Camelot has ever taken a cue
from the river. In all the bad ways,
the town is more like Mantua than Mantua itself is:
stinkier and with more fights-per-hour in the bars.
As many broken beer bottles and wrecked cars
litter the banks of the Camelot river as anywhere in Northern B.C.

The address Lenny
gave me is on the west side of the Fraser
, and as I cross the bridge I realize
Artie must be living in the nest of low hills ac
ross from the mouth of the Camelot. If anyone
in Camelot had any brains it would be the town's
choicest real estate, but the area filled up with
squatters' shacks forty years ago, and the only improvements since
the land got subdivided have been the trailers people haul in to replace the shacks that burn down.

Artie's place isn't
difficult to find. It's a rambling shed-like building set at
the base of one of the hills. The best thing
about the place is the mint late-'50s Mercedes
convertible tucked inside a lean-to a few feet from the
house. It's a 190
SL
from the look
of it, a pretty fabulous moment in automotive history.

The house, on the other hand,
is somewhat less than mint, and not fabulous at all.
It was probably built originally to store heavy equipment,
and the conversion to living quarters has been fairly recent
and half-baked. Still, the worst thing about it is that
it appears to be deserted. I pound hard a
couple of times on the most likely entrance, a tall, windowless
side door, and while I'm waiting I look ar
ound. No empty beer cases — a good sign. Other than
that, there's a trail in the snow leading to
the lean-to and car, and another that leads into a thicket towards the rear and the hill.

I'm about to
go back to the Lincoln when a buzzy speaker I
haven't noticed crackles to life above the door. “Up
here,” a male voice tells me. “Up the hill. Just follow the path.”

It takes me some effort
to struggle up the snow-packed path with my chest and
back both giving me the gears, but at the top I discover another, larger building that wasn't visible fr
om the road. Standing outside its entrance is, I assume,
Artie Newman. I introduce myself, and am a
little surprised that Artie
isn't
surprised that I'm there. He invites me inside for coffee.

Inside
the building are four more elderly Mercedes.
One is another 190, this one a sedan rusted
as far as those cars do rust, and ravaged for
parts. There's also a decent-looking mid-‘60s 22
0 sedan, much more massive than the 190,
and a pair of fabulous older models I can't identify.
There's also a woman in her late twenties or
early thirties, blond and elegant-looking despite the grease-stained mechanic's coveralls she's wearing.

Artie himself
looks far more Scandinavian than his father. He's
roughly six feet, well-built but fine-featured, and with
a thatch of thinning, nearly white-blond hair.

“This is my wife, Elsa,” he says. “Andy
Bathgate, from the Mohawks.”

“Thought we might be seeing you,”
she says, stepping forward to shake my hand.

“Elsa helps run the bar
for Lenny weeknights,” Artie says, by way of explanation. “You take cream in your coffee?”

“Black, thanks. I gather you know why I'm he
re.”

“I have an idea,” he says, his face suddenly
serious. “But I'm not sure I can help you.”

I present my case. The
further I get into it, the less attractive it sounds, even
to me — and the more I want to
make it sound attractive. Just on appearance Artie's about two
grades above my best hopes for him. He's clearly sober
and in shape, and that's very good. And he's no
nitwit. The downside is that he's got a life here,
and it's hard to see why he'd want to
disrupt it to play hockey in a fifth-rate league
with a bunch of vicious kids, psycho wannabes, and broken-down veterans like me.

I'm nearly
out of things to say when he interrupts. “Okay,” he says. “I'll do it.”

I'm so startled that I ask him why.

Artie's initial answer is a short laugh and a shr
ug. He turns his back on me, picks a twelve-inch
crescent wrench off the bench next to him, and taps it against a vise.

“Private r
easons,” he says in a quiet voice. “It's hard
to explain.”

I look at Elsa, and she silently mouths the word “father.”

Right. Chances are he's been
sitting here for months — years, maybe — waiting for
this invitation. But even if he has, he must know
that playing for us will be leaping right into the
lion's — or hyena's — mouth. I just hope to hell
he can still play some, for his sake as
much as for ours. Alpo isn't easy for anyone to
please, and the old coot believes he has several thousand r
easons to be displeased where Artie's concerned.

I stay for another fifteen
minutes, enough time to give Artie — and Elsa, since it's
clear as hell you don't talk to one without
the other — the basics on practice times and contract
arrangements. Artie agrees to drive up to Mantua
for tonight's practice. Before I leave, I ask a few questions about the cars.

“I just winch them up and
down the hill,” Artie says. “They're Elsa's babies. She's the mechanic.”

“Why've you got them up here?” I ask her.

“Security,” she answers, with a dry chuckle. “Car thieves
are lazy.”

I file that for future consideration,
make sure I shake Elsa's hand before Artie's, and get out of there.

WHEN
I ARRIVE BACK
at the house, this time it's
Esther's truck that's parked in the driveway. I
assume that this means Wendel has his Jeep out of
the garage, or that they've traded trucks. If
the Jeep is fixed it'll be temporary, and pr
obably equipped with
brand new queen pins.

As I'm leaving for the Coliseum, Esther
pops a small surprise on me. “I may have another player for you.”

“If Artie shows up, we may not need one,” I say. “Particularly if this Quaw kid of Wendel's can make it th
rough practice without punching the shit out of everyone. Who're you thinking of?”

“Gus Tolenti called me this morning. He's interested.”

“What?”

Gus Tolenti
is the new psychiatric resident at the hospital. I've
met him a couple times at various dos around
town, but I wouldn't have tabbed him as someone who'd even
be interested in hockey let alone play — or
, if so, then maybe once upon a time. He's American,
at least my age, bald as a billiard ball,
and, well, a bit strange. I think he uses man-tan,
and I know for sure he drinks martinis, likes to
quote dead pyschiatrists in German after he's got two
or three under his belt, and wears white suits
under his white hospital smocks. Lord only knows how he
landed up in Mantua. Or why.

“What'd you tell him?” I ask.

“I told him there
was a practice at five.” Then, after a pause, she adds, “Why not?”

She's right: why not? The worst he can do is
make a fool of himself. “Did he mention what he plays?”

“I'm assuming it's hockey,
silly. What would you like it to be?” Esther
lifts my coat from the chair I'd draped it
over in the kitchen and holds it open for me.

“We could use a defenceman
,” I admit.

“I don't think you have
to worry, Andy,” she says, seeing where
my mind is going. “Nobody is going replace you.”

“Just so long as you don't,” I answer.

BY THE TIME THE
players start to
appear I'm sitting behind Jack's desk, playing General Manager. Artie
is among the first to show, lugging a tatter
ed Islanders equipment bag. I bring him into the office to
sign the insurance forms, introduce him to the players
already there, and return to the office. I
figure the best way to handle his appearance is to make it seem like it's no big deal. The toughest thing he's going to have
to face isn't going to be in the dressing r
oom or on the ice, anyway. It'll be when
his father realizes that he's here. That one
he'll have to face by himself. Let's hope he doesn't face it from under the wheels of the Zamboni.

I've bar
ely sat down at the desk again when Gus Tolenti
shows. Goddamned if he's not wearing a white suit
and toting a white bag. I wander out to say
hello to him, then try to make some straight-faced intr
oductions. A couple of the younger players, Bobby Bell included, look
at him as if he's from Mars, but
there's nothing I can do about that. For all
I know they're right.

There's a few audible
giggles when he opens the equipment bag and everything inside
it, including his gloves and skates, is white, too. But the
skates aren't figure skates — they're good
ones, and well broken in.

“What's with the white duds?” I say,
trying to make it sound conversational.

“I played for the medical
school team at Harvard,” he says. “That's what we wore.”

Good enough
for me. I've just gotten him into the office to
sign the releases when the dressing room goes silent.

With good reason. Wendel
and Gord have come in, and they've brought F
reddy Quaw. Freddy is a behemoth, as wide
as Gord and two or three inches taller
. I let Wendel make the introduc- tions, stepping
forward only at the end to shake hands myself.
“Glad to have you aboard,” I say. He
looks like the building could land on his head and not hurt him.

Freddy merely gr
unts for an answer, and tosses his equip- ment
bag onto a nearby bench as if it were
as light as a purse. “Let's get on with it,” he says.