The Last of the Lumbermen (25 page)

“Very funny. Hey. Did you see Alpo
anywhere? He's usually threatening to run
us over with the Zamboni by the end of practice.”

“Didn't
see hide nor hair of him. But I'd bet money
he was there somewhere, watching his kid.”

“If he was, he's got to be pleasantly surprised.”

Gord snorts. “If it was anyone but Alpo, maybe.”

“Incidentally,
has Wendel talked to you about this loony tour
nament idea of his?”

Gord straightens noticeably. “I don't think it's a
loony idea. It may bring back bad memories for you,
but there's nothing basically wrong with a tournament.
So try not to rain on the kid's parade too much.”

I mumble
something noncommittal and paw at a piece of fluf
f that's gotten itself lodged in my jacket zipper.
When I look up, Gord is eyeing me. “Anything else on your mind?”

I tell him about discovering that
James Bathgate is my half brother. I half-expect him
to tell me he's known about it for years, but he doesn't.

“I'll
be damned,” he says, then laughs out loud. “We
should have known that smart mouth of his had to
come from some- where nearby. You spoken to your father yet?”

“He's out of town right now. Until the weekend.”

“That's
going to be interesting,” Gord says. “On both
sides. I've met Claire Bathgate a couple of times.
She's a very strong woman. Nice enough, though. Does the kid have any idea?”

“Not according to
Claire, no. But the way he'd been burning my butt makes me wonder.”

“Well,” he says, almost wistfully. “Everyone carries their
secrets in their own way. You know
better than most people how deep that can go. Time
for you to use a little of that wisdom you'
re always claiming you don't have. Figure out what
the discretions are, and try to do the right thing by them.”

Gord is staring at me, and it's apparent that there's an implicit request in what he's saying to me. Not the pleading
kind, just straight across and straight up. This is
about him and Jack, and he wants me to acknowledge it.

“Well, you know
,” I say, grinning helplessly despite the gravity of the
moment, “I can't see a goddamned thing about you that's
any different than it was three days
ago. Or Jack, for that matter — aside from having only one knee. Have you talked to him?”

“They're doing
his knee at eight o'clock tomorrow morning. He's pretty jittery, but oka
y. Thanks for asking.”

I shake my head. There's something wrong
with the way Gord said that, too formal or
something, as if I were inquiring about a member
of a different species or something. And it's important
that I not let it get by. “Wait
a minute, here. Jack's my fucking friend, too. Just like before. Like always.”

I catch the
twinkle in his eye before I realize what
I've just said. “No,” he says. “He's
my
fucking friend,
actually. He's just your
friend
.”

I give him a playful
push — it's like pushing a brick wall —
and my chest hurts. “Let's get out of here,”
I say, “before I need another one of your prescriptions.”

Stan enters
the dressing room as we leave the office. “He
y, Weaver,” he says. “Your little pal ain't as little as he looks.”

“What?”

“Well, I followed him out like you asked.”

“Uh huh. Who picked him up?”

“That's just it. Nobody
did. He's got a Ski-Doo parked out back. And when
he went past me there wasn't no adult driving
it for him. The little punko was skinning it at about sixty right down the sidewalk.”

TWENTY-SEVEN

O
KENOKE, B.C. IS A
ninety-kilometre, one-hour road trip f
rom Mantua, across a stretch of post-glacial
plateau dotted with small lakes and river valleys cut th
rough by an ice-graded winter road that runs
straight as a board from one clearcut
valley to the next. I can recall a time
— when I was a kid — when it was
beautiful, and at this time of year it's possible to
forget how little timber is left behind the
fifty-metre strips the government makes the companies leave to fool the tourists.

Okenoke itself
is another story. It was never beautiful, and now it's
a certified shithole, a testament to just how ugly a
logging town can get. About thirty-five hundred people
live within the city limits, another two- or three
thousand more in the surrounding countryside. The
hockey games draw a thousand of them most nights.

About the only notable
things you can say about Okenoke are that three
generations of a family named Silver have played for the
Bears, including their current player-coach, Blacky Silver; that
the Silver family isn't much like the Ratsloffs of
Camelot; and that Okenoke is the only place in
the world with a hockey cemetery. Blacky Silver's
father donated the cemetery land after the Silvers' logging operations got bought out by the multinationals a decade ago. The old guy was the first
to be buried there, and ever since, the Silver family
has been scooping hockey- playing stiffs and reinterring
them in their cemetery. As the regional coroner
, Gord has been a help. He does it,
he says, because it gives people in Okenoke a sense of
place. Doesn't help the forests or keep the
locals from spending their vacation time and money in Thailand,
where the Silver family bought a hotel after they sold out, but you can't have everything.

This particular Friday
night in Okenoke, though, a few quite notable things happen.
One of them is, well, borderline remarkable: the
Mantua Mohawks put a trouncing on the Bears nine
to two, and there isn't a moment in
the entire game when the Bears look capable of beating
us. Wendel gets four goals, one shorthanded. I put Artie
Newman between Gord and Freddy, and
they put up four goals and two assists between them.
Artie pots three of the goals unassisted, mainly because the
Bears become very distracted trying to avoid his two behemoth
wingers. Freddy and Gord don't mind at all. The
three of them are so much fun to
watch that I forget they're playing on my
line, and that there might be a few objections to
breaking them up when I return. Screw them. I'll play with Wendel.

The
other notables? One is the weather, which begins to
warm up Friday morning. By game time the temperature is
well into the forties, turning the roads to slush
and Okenoke's crowded little arena into a steam bath.

Another notable is Freddy
Quaw's uniform, which he's had someone redesign to fit him.
He's added a dollop of his own design as well.
Chief Wahoo now sits inside a circle of white
tape, with a strip of red tape across
his face. Freddy doesn't explain the redesign, and no
one says anything about it except to laugh. My
only comment is that it's an improvement. I won't
be surprised if Jack, when he returns, doesn't arrange
to have the rest of us do the same thing.

Gus Tolenti doesn't disgrace himself. He even gets into a fight when the Bears try to tease
him about his white skates and gloves. He's in f
ront of their bench when they start in on
him, but Gus isn't deterred. “This is hospital issue,”
he roars as he wades into them. “You'll
be seeing more of it after I get th
rough with you.”

He doesn't do so well once the fight gets
going. He takes on their toughest player, a big
winger who worked as a faller and knows his way
around. He pulls Gus's sweater over his head and
then proceeds to pound him until Freddy grabs
him from behind in a bearhug. Freddy's
move is more peacemaking than aggression, and the r
ef doesn't even park him for it. But more
than anything Gus does by himself is the effect
he seems to have on Pat Horricks, the kid I've
paired him with. Pat plays better than I've seen
him play outside practice, better than I thought he was
capable of. He rushes the puck every chance he gets,
and when he does, it doesn't turn into a br
eakaway for the Bears as usually happens.

James does his job, although
I have to tell him to shut up a couple of
times when he starts giving the gears to the Bears'
players. He takes that well once I point out that
he's working now, and that it's my job to
stand on top of the bench to scream and yell and point out who's an idiot.

I
stuck him with Bobby Bell for the drive up, but
on the way home I put him in the back
seat of the Lincoln with Wendel, explaining that it's my
job to make sure he gets home safely.
He doesn't complain, and within ten minutes he's asleep with
his head on Wendel's shoulder. Ten minutes
later he's in Wendel's lap, snoring.

The sight gives Esther a case
of the giggles she can't exactly explain to Wendel, and
doesn't need to explain to me. On the whole, it's
been one hell of an evening. Partly the easy win,
partly that Wendel asked to drive up with Esther and
I. And the sight of my son in the back seat of my car with his uncle's head nestled in his lap isn't something I ever expected to see.

We win five to three on Sunday afternoon in
Camelot. We beat the Roosters pretty much the same
way as we beat the Bears, except that this time
Gus keeps his nose clean (and intact) and so does everyone
else, including all the Ratsloffs. I don't think the
Roosters quite know what to make of us after Fr
eddy knocks Neil Ratsloff cold in the first period. Neil
tried to rough him up in the corner,
Freddy lashed out an elbow that looked like a
sixby-six, and down Neil went without a whimper.
After that, it's the cleanest game I've seen in this league for years.

And in between the two games,
I talk to my father for the first time in thirty years.

KICK ME
FOR IT
if you want, but I can't bring myself
to call him Saturday morning. I tell myself I don't
know when he arrives back, but that's a technicality.
Some part of me I don't have any experience arguing
with has told me that the next move is his.
Hasn't he known I'm around when I didn't
know he was? Still, I'm not quite convinced. I keep going
to the phone and picking it up, then putting
it back on the receiver, like a teenager mus
tering up the courage to phone for a date.

He calls me. When I get back from
grocery shopping with Esther late Saturday morning his voice
is on the answering machine, a hesitant, grave tenor that
makes me realize I have no private memories of
him that haven't been utterly corroded by the contempt
my mother heaped on him after they broke
up. And I realize another curious thing: ever since I've
learned that he's here in Mantua and still alive,
I've held back from imagining him.

“Andy?” the voice on
the machine says. It is a voice absolutely without authority
, neither quite asking a question or demanding my attention. “This
is your father. I arrived back this morning on
the plane, and Claire tells me you'd like to see me.”

There is an excruciatingly long pause before he continues. “I can't tell you how happy this makes
me. And that you seem to have taken James under
your wing. Can you call me when you get a
moment, so we can set up a time where
we can meet face to face?”

Click. For a moment I
stand looking out the window, with Bozo nuzzling
my hand and Fang tugging at my pantleg. When I
turn around to face Esther, there a
re tears rolling down my cheeks.

Esther guides me into
the living room and sits me down. Next thing I
know, she's pressing a cup of tea into
my hand. But the tears just keep coming, without anything else,
no blubbering, not even the familiar constricted throat. Just these strange tears.

I sit there for fifteen
minutes, until Bozo remembers that tears are deliciously salty
and begins to slobber all over my face. As abr
uptly as they took me, they're gone. I push
Bozo gently away, not quite sure if I'm grateful
for the intervention, pick up the phone, and dial the
number from memory. As I listen to the
telephone's
drrrrrup
, I realize that the number I've just
dialed is the only thing in my head. The
rest is blank — I have no plan whatever
, not even for the formalities on which to coast
into this thing. I'm hoping I won't start blubbering over the
phone, that's all.

Claire Bathgate answers, which throws me
because, well, I'm not sure who — or what
— to ask for. Do I ask for “father
,” or do I take possession and ask for “my” father?
Or is it a stranger named “Ron Bathgate”? All of
them, I guess. What did I call him while I was
a kid?
Dad
. But that was nearly thirty years
ago, and I haven't used the word since.

In those seconds between Clair
e's “Hello” and my reply, I go through
a virtual lifetime. I see a tableau of my father
from a childhood I thought I'd forgotten —
looking up at him backlit through a haze of
sunlight, a tall, potentially terrible figure who somehow wasn't ever
terrible or frightening but rather a softvoiced warmth with
a thick halo of dark hair and large rough
hands resting on my shoulders. I recall a view of him from theback window of a car — was it a taxi?
— as my mother and I left him.

I hear my
voice ask this question: “Can I speak to my father
, please?” Before I speak to him, it is done,
over. I've taken possession of him, reclaimed him from the long absence.

His first
words confirm the claim. He repeats the words
he used on the answering machine: “Andy? This is your father.”

For an excruciating moment, no wo
rds will come. Then they stutter from my lips:
“I know. Yes. It
is
you.” Absurdly,
I find myself closer to laughter than to tears. I
stop myself, try to compose the tangle of feelings,
and succeed so far that I can deliver a single
coherent sentence. “I'd like to come out there
and see you.”

“Yes,” he answers. “I'd like
that very much. Will you bring your wife and son? I'd like to meet them, too.”

“Sure, yes.”
There's no way to explain the complexities of the
situation to him right now, and no reason to.
Esther will come with me, but Wendel is off
on his own — plowing his way through
the slushy streets on his way, as is
James by a different route, to the hockey practice I'm going to skip. “An hour?”

“That'll be just fine. I'm looking forward to it.”

THE THREE
HOURS THAT
follow are exhilarating, excruciating, illuminating,
disappointing. Big words, small events. We shake hands, we
embrace, we sit down in chairs, we talk. But the
big moment — the true, real one, is the
first one, on the telephone. Everything that follows is aftermath,
the settling in. I guess that shouldn't surprise me. The big
moments in life never turn out to be dramatic or
long. They're so quick and unexpected that most of
the time we miss them and we're left with
the rest of what our lives are made up
of. But if we're lucky enough to catch and
appreciate those moments of real life, everything that follows
is bigger and wider and richer than it was before. But not, I think, any easier to explain or to live.