The Last of the Lumbermen (29 page)

PART THREE

THIRTY-ONE

S
EVEN WEEKS LATER, THINGS
are back to normal
around here — although normal isn't what it
used to be. I'm just about to suit up
for my first practice since the run-in with the
bear when Esther sticks her head inside the dressing room door.

“I need about five
of you guys out here,” she says. “Not includ-
ing you, Andy.”

The seven or eight of us
who don't have our skates on yet troop to
the door, Wendel among them. She motions them
down the hallway and steps inside.

I put one of my skates on, stand up,
and then sit down to lace it up. She sits down
beside me. She's holding something behind her back.

“What you got there, sweetheart?” I ask.

She hands me a new helmet, a bulky white Bauer.

Jack's
making smart remarks before I can even get
the damned thing on. “What's he supposed to do with that?
Go deep sea diving?”

“Maybe,” Esther answers. “He looks like a
pinhead with the old one, and it isn't safe.”

“Well, better get him a flak
jacket. His head's so full of rocks you could
whack him across the side of the head with a sledgehammer and not hurt anything.”

Esther doesn't miss a beat. “Try
the helmet on, Andy,” she says. “I'll get you the flak jacket later.”

I don't
get the chance to argue because the helmet isn't
all she's brought. Her bearers are
returning from safari carrying large cardboar
d boxes. Wendel rips into the box he's carrying, and
pulls out a pair of forest green hockey
pants. “Cool,” he says. “Let's see the jerseys.”

Our new uniforms have arrived just
in time for the tournament.

A FEW THINGS HAVE
happened.

One of them is
that the Mantua Mohawks are no more. No,
we didn't disband. For the first time in decades ther
e hasn't been a reason to. We didn't lose a
single game while I was on the
DL
. We've
made second place, six points behind the Roosters with two games
left, one in Okenoke and the other in Wilson
Lake. But a week ago some yahoos broke into
the Wilson Lake arena and started a fi
re in the concession booth. The fire spread,
turning the arena's north side into a write-off,
including the ice-making equipment. The facility is out for the yea
r, and there's talk of tearing it down and starting from scratch.

That touched o
ff a whole set of consequences. The Stingers were
in last place, and with their arena gone, an
arson investigation underway, and charges pending against
the coach's son for being one of the yahoos, the team
decided it wanted to opt out of the playoffs.
Jack and I drove down to Camelot for a
league meeting, and we all agreed to cancel the playo
ffs. We wanted to play but Wilson Lake didn't,
Blacky Silver from Okenoke agreed with them, and Old
Man Ratsloff said he didn't care one way
or the other. It wasn't like he'd gone
yellow. More like he'd made a decision about
where the Roosters would have a better shot at
beating us — in a five-game playoff in a dead league or in a possible one-gamer in a tournament.

The Mantua Memorial Tournament has grown up from
Wendel and Esther's Saturday night pipe d
ream. Co-sponsored by Wally Weimer's Northern Sports
and the Native Band, it's going to be four days of
hockey, fun, and mayhem starting Thursday night March
29th and ending Sunday afternoon April Fools' Day. T
welve teams are coming in from as far
off as Saskatchewan and Idaho. One of them is the Chilliwack Lions.

Once we made the decision
to go ahead with a tournament, getting teams to play
was easy: a half-dozen phone calls, and five days later
we were turning them away. I guess Senior
tournaments are like the Senior leagues: more
players and teams left than leagues and tournaments.

Teams kept calling in
weeks after, and some of the teams that wanted
in got pretty damned strange with their offers.
Jack got bribes, threats, and a couple of
propositions he won't talk about. The strangest one was f
rom a team of musicians from Vancouver, who
offered to play music wherever we wanted
if we'd let them into the tournament — sort of
like a tournament orchestra. I think Jack was tempted by
that one. They sounded like fun.

It helped that we made
the economics attractive. Entry fee of five hundred dollars
a team, tournament prize of ten thousand dollars, with five thousand
for placing second, twenty-five hundred for third.
We got a big chunk of the prize money
from the Native Band, who I think put it up
as much to tweak Garvin Snell's nose as anything else.
Snell unwittingly set himself up for the tweaking. He got his
nose up around the middle of his fore
head the first moment he got wind that a tournament
was in the offing, and after Jack approached him
for financial support it went higher yet.

When Wally surprised us by
kicking in three grand without being asked, it was
clear that the tournament was going to fly. City Hall
might want to ignore it but they weren't
going to stop it from happening. Gord and Jack coughed up a cheque each for one thousand dollars, and I gave Esther
my cheque for the same amount. I'm allowed to change my mind, aren't I?

There was one
other complication that made everyone happy by the time it was
worked out. The Native Band made their support conditional
on us changing the name of the team: no mo
re Chief Wahoo on the jerseys, no more
Mohawks. Only a moron would have missed that one winging
its way toward us. It was coming from
within the team anyway, with Jack being encouraged by F
reddy Quaw's creative defacing of Chief Wahoo.

Mucking
around with Chief Wahoo was contagious. By the
time we were five games into the winning str
eak, nearly everyone had been messing with him. Most just imitated
what Freddy'd done, but a couple of guys, no
doubt egged on by Gus Tolenti, whited Wahoo out completel
y. Bobby Bell got a black pen and extended the
chief's nose so it reached around to the
back of the sweater, and Junior used the same
pen to blacken half of Wahoo's teeth. Anyway,
last week we held a team meeting after Jack and I
came back from cancelling the playoffs, and we
made it official. The Mantua Mohawks are dead, long
live the Mantua Lumbermen.

That's when I discovered what Esther
was doing at Wally's the day I picked up Junior
's mask: she'd been ordering new uniforms for the team.
She saw it coming before anyone. She'd orde
red the uniforms without crests, but when she talked
to the Native Band about sponsoring the tournament and caught wind
that they weren't very happy with the Wahoo c
rests, she got Freddy to design a new
one with the only name that made sense. It's a beaut,
like the new uniforms: green on white, with “Lumbermen”
on an ascending diagonal over a healthy but slightly squat
spruce tree.

In an ideal universe I suppose we'd
have all sat down around a table and voted
on the new name and uniforms — in which case the
uniforms would have arrived around the year 2050. Sometimes you have to cut across a few people's lawns
to get where you have to go. I'm glad Esther
had the sense to do it for us even if
it cost her four grand.

What else? Well, as you can see,
Jack is back, smart mouthed as ever. His playing days
are over, and even now that the heavy
cast is off his knee his idea of rehab
is high-speed gymnastics on his crutches and a
lot of hop skip and jump manoeuvres when he
loses track of where the crutches are.
He's aware of what I discovered when I
packed that bag for him, but without us having to come
right out and talk about it we let each other
know nothing's changed. Anyway, what was there to
say about what's really just another secret that's br
eaking down, outliving its usefulness. While we were co-coaching we
amused ourselves with some cheesy jokes about limp-wrist shots and
come-frombehind victories that nobody else except maybe Gus and
Gord could make heads or tails of. Nothing new
there, either. About the only change is that he
and Gord are uncles to a slightly la
rger family than they had before. They don't seem
unhappy about the New World Order.

Bozo is back to
normal, or almost. The vet says she'll likely end
up with some arthritis when she's older, but the
hip has mended fine, the wounds are closed, and her
immune system seems to have relaxed. Come summer, she's
going to have company. Esther and Claire
are cooking up a scheme to start breeding
dogs, and Esther has ordered a pair of
pedigree Newfoundland pups from a breeder north of Edmonton.

THERE WERE JUST TWO
objections
to the new uniforms when Esther showed us the colour
scheme and the crest design. Gus wanted to know
if “Lumbermen” shouldn't maybe be “Lumberpersons.” That got him guffaws
and some advice about what would happen to his “lumberpersons” if they showed their prissy cans at the bars.

“C'mon Gus,” Jack said when the laughter died back enough for
anyone to be heard. “Tell us what you
really want the team to be called.”

“How about
The Mantua Seedlings
.”

“We're a little old for that, a
ren't we?” I asked.

“Speak for yourself, white-hair.”

The only other criticism was mine. I wanted
to know if maybe the ascending diagonal on the cr
est shouldn't have been descending, given the state of the industr
y. That got me a wise- ass grin from Wendel, and more laughs f
rom the others.

Now that the new duds are here,
I have to say that Wally did a fabulous job
putting them together. The jerseys are named and numbe
red without mistakes, and the materials are first class.
We're going to be so pretty when
we hit the ice in these duds people are going to swoon.

Yeah,
sure, we're still a Senior hockey team fr
om a league that might not see another season. But in
our different ways, we all feel like we've
earned the right to be gorgeous and good for
a few weeks. Me, Jack, Gord, Junior, and one
or two others for having hung in as long as
we have, some of the others for having played as well as they have in the last while.

For
Artie, for instance, it's been pure pleasure, and
you can see it written all over him. Never mind that
Alpo still hasn't acknowledged him, or that his wife pr
obably isn't pleased that her husband is spending so much
of his time in Mantua. He's a player, and
there's no one in the league outside of Wendel
who's better. Alpo is dead wrong about his
son. He's no pisstank washout, no traitor to his family
and ethnic heritage. Artie Newman has grown up, and
he's a better man than his father. Alpo gets smaller each day he refuses to see it.

Artie
wasn't the only one who grew in my estimation
over those seven weeks. Junior is finally earning his status
as starting goalie. For a guy thirty pounds overweight, he's
always had surprising reflexes. But with everyone in the league shooting for his head, all anyone saw of his reflexes was
how good he was at ducking pucks, falling on his
face, and avoiding stitches and sutures. I mostly saw
the puck hitting the twine behind him. I missed the
talent he'd used up keeping it from hitting him
in the face.