The Last of the Lumbermen (30 page)

The mask made him utterly fearless. For a
few games, he seemed to want to stop as many shots
with the mask as with the stick or blocker.
I don't think he'd ever had so much fun in
his entire life. But once the shooters around the
league realized he wasn't ducking they stopped head-hunting, and the
real test of his skills took over. Junior passed
that, screeching with derision as a shot fr
om the blueline bounced harmless off his chest and
into his glove, howling with glee as he sprawled along
the goal crease to kick a deflection into the
stands. The crease became his hunting preserve, and he
laid the lumber to anyone who got too comfortable inside it.

He makes
mistakes, sure. He got caught wandering from the
crease a couple of times, and the first brawl
with the Roosters he stormed down the ice to dance with Lenny and got thrashed.

But it's true what they
say: winning works. A whole generation of lousy Mohawks
got dragged up to the level that Wendel and Artie
play at. Dickie Pollard, who'd gotten onto the team
a few years back because he was Bobby Bell's best
friend, and had spent as much time sitting on the
bench as Jack could manage, suddenly turned into our best
defenceman. Winning helped his confidence, but what helped more
was a conversation between five or six of us after Dickie
had left one of the practices. Jack and I
were talking about how to improve our still-por
ous defense for the tournament, and it didn't take long for
Dickie's chronically rotten play to come up.

“Dickie's hopeless,” I said, “but what
can we do? He won't hit anybody, and every time
someone comes near him he gives away the puck.”

“It isn't him,” Wendel interrupted. “Haven't you ever noticed that he's pretty decent in practice and when we're on the road?”

“So what if he's
Bobby Orr in practice?” I snorted. “He turns into a gerbil when there's anything on the line.”

“
Well, next time he's on the ice, check out the
old bag sitting just above the penalty box.”

“Oh yeah. I've seen her,” I
said. “That woman's really something. Didn't they toss
her out of the Coliseum last year for whacking JoMo Ratslo
ff with her purse while he was in the
penalty box?”

“That's the one,” Wendel said. “Dickie's mother. She's
been riding him ever since he was in Peewee. He can't
play when she's around. He takes one look at her and his spine goes Jell-O.”

“Nothing we can do about that,”
Jack said. “We can't exactly ban her from the games.”

Freddy,
who'd been listening in on the conversation, had a
suggestion. “We could have somebody sit next to her
and have them point out the error of her ways
next time she gets out of hand.”

“Like who?” Jack asked. “Jack the Ripper?”

“How about my sister?”

“Who's your sister?”

“Frieda Lane.”

“Frieda Lane
is your sister?” I said. “Holy shit. That's really something.”

What it is is really funny. Every bureaucrat
in North Central B.C. is terrified of Frieda Lane. Frieda
has a law degree, and she's been the motor behind
the Band's attempt to reclaim downtown Mantua. She's supposed to
have a mean streak a mile wide, but the
several times I've run into her she's been decent enough.
If genetics run true, she'll have the right sense
of humour for what we need.

“Why don't you talk to her?” someone suggested.

Freddy laughed. “Consider it done.”

It got done. I
don't know what Frieda said to the old bag, but it must have been good. Dickie's mother stopped showing up
for the games, and Dickie's play improved, night to blinding
bloody sunlight.

BUT ALL THE NEWS
isn't good. We might
not get to wear our beautiful uniforms next yea
r. A four-team Senior league can cruise along
out of sheer habit, but a league with just thr
ee teams is too small to survive. Personally, I
can't see any way there'll be a functioning ar
ena in Wilson Lake by next fall. And anyway,
for leagues like the
NSHL
, the writing has been
on the wall for a long time. Senior hockey is
in trouble just about everywhere. It's mostly television, I
guess. It kills local local sports like it does everything else.

Back
in the glory days, when the leagues were the
main action in town and the players really were
semi-pros, the community got them good jobs and other
perks to stay around for. That's why the Penticton
Vees or the Trail Smoke Eaters could win the
World Championships and not have their players ripped off
by the
NHL
. They were better players and better
teams than we've got now, and the towns they
came from loved them better. Those days a
re long, long gone, and they aren't about to
come back. Not even if the Mantua Lumbermen play their
games in the most beautiful uniforms in hockey history.

Garvin Snell, meanwhile, is
a man in touch with his time, even if he
spends most of his energy licking its boots. A
Major Junior franchise in Victoria is up for grabs, and,
not more than a week after the Native Band
helped us bully him into giving the permits for the tournament,
Snell phoned Jack to say he was putting together
a consortium to transfer the Victoria Junior A team up
here. He also told Jack that he'll be calling
for proposals to build a five-thousand-seat arena
in Mantua, in which case the Mohawks should starting looking a
round for new digs. Hard to say whether or not he's just yanking our chain. If he's serious, the corporate sponsors will line up to
support him. Maybe I'll support him, too. Maybe our time
is over and we ought to pack it in.

Maybe,
maybe. But not quite yet. There's the Mantua Memorial
Tournament in a few days, and the Mantua Lumbermen, the
beautiful green-and-white Lumbermen, will get one last shot at winning the Mantua Cup.

THIRTY-TWO

I
'D BET MONEY THE
Enola Gay would still be revving
its engines on the runway and the scientists would
still be in the labs scratching their heads if
building the A-bomb had been as complicated as delivering
a double knockout hockey tournament draw. An exaggeration? Maybe.
But one part of the Bomb builders' job was dead easy
. They weren't trying to be fair to everyone.

Okay, bad joke all round. But I
swear, making a double knockout hockey tournament look —
and be — fair to everyone involved is A-bomb-level complicated. First,
the double knockout part isn't optional. No team deserves to
travel five hundred miles, pay a five-hundred-dollar entry fee,
and then get sent home after a single game.
Second, you have to set up the draw so the weak
teams feel like they've really had a shot. That's
not as easy as it sounds, because while you're st
roking the weakies you can't let the good teams beat
each other's brains out in the first games, either. The fans have rights, too.

The tournament object, naturally, is to get the two
best teams into the final. But you can't get them the
re by screwing around with the rest. Still
not convinced about how complicated this is? Remember that
you're dealing with muscular men, and occasionally they show up with small brains. Their managers and coaches, this being the modern age, have
learned to whine about their rights with the best of them.

In the end, Jack came up
with a draw that was fair enough that no one
could challenge it, and which let nature take its
course as far as that's possible: we're placing
teams in the draw according to when they arrive in
town. That may not sound like Darwin's version of natural
selection, but the parallels are there. Jack realized,
things being what they are, that the teams that
come for non-hockey reasons — like wanting to have
a major pissup or wanting to see our particular backwater
of the wide world — will tend to arrive early
. A few of the serious, well-organized teams will show
up early as well, so their players will have time
to eat, catch some sleep, and generally unwind from
traveling. The late-arriving teams will be the goofs — and the
teams that have the least distance to travel. Since he
knew that group would probably include the Roosters and
Okenoke, one good team and another fairly decent team, it
would mean the late draws have a decent mix as well.

Into that we
have to fold another set of complications. For the first two
rounds, we have to use two arenas. Mantua
has four artificial ice surfaces, but only two have any
spectator seating. The Memorial Coliseum can put roughly twenty-five
hundred bums on boards, but the rink north
of town we've rented can only sit about two hundr
ed fifty people on the benches above the dressing r
ooms, with another fifty or so standing around behind the
glass on the far side. We have to get
the best games — and the best draws — into the Coliseum.

Then there's the
time frame. With the first games starting at seven and
running in four-hour slots, the third set of
games might start as late as three am.
Commerce being what it is, we have to set ourselves
in the first or second game at the Coliseum. That will mean a slight advantage to us, but only morons would object.

THE TOURNAMENT DRAW SHAPES
up as we hope.
The Battleford Raiders drive in late Wednesday afternoon, and
go straight to the bar for a piss-up right after they
register and before they check into the Columbia,
which is Mantua's version of Piss-Tank Central. All
they'll have to do is stagger upstairs when the bar closes.

I'm not around when they arrive, but when I
glance over their roster an hour or so later I
recognize a few guys I played against in the Alberta
leagues. If they're halfway sober by the time the tournament starts, they'll do fairly well.

The
Creston Cougars and Idaho Saints pull up in f
ront of the Coliseum while I'm looking over the Raiders'
roster. As the Cougars roll off their bus,
it's evident they don't need to go to any bar
. If you closed your eyes when the bus doors
swung open you'd have sworn they were climbing out
of the back end of a beer truck. And
as if to prove that no one had been
holding them captive, they stumble back onto the bus as soon
as they're registered and head to
the bar. Like the Raiders, they're staying at
the Columbia.

The Idaho Saints file off their bus looking
like Mormon missionaries, all of them scrawny and decked
out in white shirts, skinny dark ties, and Superman haircuts.
When their coach called in weeks before none of
us had heard of the team, and we had
no idea how they got wind of us. Their coach begged
his way into the tournament, claiming his team has been
playing tournaments all over North America for seven years, and that
they're highly competitive. Jack let them in because they
were the only American team to enter.

They turn out to
be students from a Bible college outside Missoula, mostly teenagers
from the look of them. I've seen their kind
before. They've come to praise the Lord, perform
acts of missionary-type piety, and, more or less incidentall
y, play hockey. Why they're called the
Idaho
Saints eludes me. Missoula is in Montana. The Lord acts in mysterious ways.

Jack and I have a quick conference in which
we decide to let the Cougars register second so they'll
play the Raiders in the first round. Jack then signs
up the Saints and places us fourth in the draw.
That way, the missionaries will get at least one
game in before they're butchered. It isn't
exactly ethical but it is, definitely, the Christian thing to do.

LATE THE
FOLLOWING MORNING
, the Fort St. John Drillers, Terrace Flyers, and
Chilliwack Lions show up. All three teams seem
serious about the tournament, at least judging from their
arrival times and states of sobriety. I have my most
careful look at the Chilliwack team — big surprise.
They aren't calling themselves the Christian Lions anymore, but
I have a feeling they're still sponsored by
car dealers, and there's likely to be some devout Christians on the bus.

I felt a small bump when I heard the
Lions had arrived, and another when Esther mentioned that their manager
said they were coming to defend the Cup. They
even came up with the old Mantua Cup from
somewhere — dug out of somebody's closet or rescued
from a police evidence archive — and considerately
sent it along two weeks before so we could have it fixed up.

As they step off the bus, I r
ealize I'm looking at them not as hockey players but as
survivors. Even though I know better, I'm looking for
specific
survivors. A dozen total strangers, young, beefy ones who
all look like they know how to play hockey,
file off the bus before I find the one I'm looking for.

When he appears, he's mo
re than I'm expecting: a dead ringer for Mikey Davidson.
Same height, build, colouring, probably the same age as Mikey
was. The same sweetness in his eyes, even. Startled, I call out the family name. He looks up.

“Do I know you?” he asks, eyeing me as he walks toward me.

“You're related to Michael Davidson, aren't you?”

The boy shrugs. “Everyone called him ‘Mikey' I heard,” he says in a matter-of-fact way. “He was my uncle,
father's brother. Died a long time ago, in
that bus accident, I think. You probably know mo
re about him than I do.”

“I knew him,” I admit.

“You play with him or against him?” he
asks, getting interested.

“With,” I answer. We
are veering toward some dangerous ground. “Some, anyway
.”

“I heard those were pretty great
Lions teams, back then. Won this tournament the last two times, didn't they?”

“They did,” I say.

“So who are you?” he asks.

“Andy Bathgate.”

He
says nothing for a moment. Then his eyes narro
w. “You're Andy Bathgate?”

“No, no,” I say. “Not the famous one.”

“I didn't mean that
one. I meant Andy Bathgate. Billy Menzies.”

I freeze. How
does this kid know this? As far as I kno
w, there's still a warrant out for my arr
est as Billy Menzies. And how come he doesn't come after me for being the one who killed his uncle?

The kid sees
that I'm startled. “Everyone knows that story in Chilliwack. People have
been wondering for years why you haven't shown up.”

“I haven't shown up
because I killed four people. Who told you Andy Bathgate was Billy Menzies?”

He
stares at me for a moment. “Christ,” he says.
“You don't know, do you?”

“Know what?”

“Those charges were
dropped a year after you disappeared. The coach was
driving the bus when it hit that semi-trailer. The
bastard let you take the rap, and it only
came out when he got drunk one night and confessed the whole thing. Couldn't stand the guilt, I guess. He did four years for it. No one ever told you?”

“I never checked.”

“Hey, I gotta find my gear,” he says. “Maybe we'll talk later.”

“Sounds good to me,” I say, forcing a
laugh. “Maybe I'll see you on the ice.”

“You coaching one of the teams?”

“I still play,” I say. “For the Lumbermen. Host team.”

“Stay
cool, man,” he snaps back, pleased that he's gotten to
me. “Are all the Lumbermen
OAPS
like you?”

“You'll find out when you play us.”

In his mind, he'd just
recited an ancient piece of local history — but it's
a lot more than that to me. I wander
back inside the Coliseum, stunned, and run into Jack.

“Jesus, Weaver,” he says. “You're white as a sheet. You okay?”

“I think so. I just need to go for a walk.”

I HEAD OUT THE
back door of the arena,
and a few moments later I'm sitting halfway up the
hill behind it. Screw the weather, and screw
the raven that's sitting above me in one of the
trees, telling me to get off his turf.
Some things I've been puzzled by for a long time a
re slipping into new perspective. The first is that
a lot of people seem to know what happened to
Billy Menzies, and haven't been judgmental about it. Esther's
remark when this all broke open, for instance, about
“the poor bastard” suddenly makes sense. I thought she
was forgiving me out of some unfathomable generosity,
along with Gord and whoever else knew who
I was — my father and stepmother, probably
. And all this time, they've assumed that I knew
the real story, too. I didn't check my version against theirs.

A FEW MINUTES
AFTER
climbing down off the hill I run into
Blacky Silver from Okenoke in the Coliseum lobby.
He's come in look- ing for Jack, and unintentionally sc
rews up our draw strategy. I tell him
where to register, and as a courtesy explain
how the draw works. I let him know that Chilliwack is the seventh team to register, and that if he registers now
they'll play them at the Coliseum at eleven
PM
.