The Last of the Lumbermen (35 page)

The cycle of the moon is close to full, but
the orb is still low in the sky, leaving the skies to the stars and the hydrocarbon haze from downtown. The faint band
of the Milky Way over us reminds us, if
we want the perspective, that an infinity of hockey tournaments
are being played out there, together with an
infinity of everything else.

The dogs range ahead of us, Bozo leading sedately
with her still-tender hip, Fang bounding around her like
a spotted yo-yo. Esther and I walk beside the ribbon
of unmelted snow from my winter snowshoe trail, silent as
the dogs but holding hands, drinking in the familiar redolence
of mud and last fall's ferment- ing poplar leaves. It's
one of those annual perfumes that life smears across
your sensorium around here, and it took me
a long time to decipher the message. Life, it suggests, doesn't
start anew each year. It percolates and composts
everything that came before, and out of
that
comes the rebirth.

“Andy,
where are the dogs?” As always, Esther is
in the real world.

I play the Maglite's powerful
beam across the landscape until it finds them
at the edge of a thicket of Russian willow.
They're motionless — Bozo with her nose to the
earth, Fang alert, one paw lifted from the
ground. Curious, I widen the flashlight's sweep and
find a pair of coyotes not more than forty
metres from them, equally alert. The coyotes
seem uncertain, and it's hard to say what they
think they're on to. Their noses are telling
them that it's domesticated dogs, but their eyes a
re telling them they've got a black bear hanging out with a rabbit or a rat.

Startled, I f
lick off the beam. Now that I know they'r
e there, I have enough light to follow them
without the beam. Or so I think. I'm expecting the
coyotes to slink off now that they know
we've seen them, but either they're habituated to human
presence or hunger is making them bold. For a
brief moment I lose sight of them, and when
I flick on the Maglite it's just in time
to see them closing in on the dogs. Before
Bozo senses they're around, the lead coyote
darts past her and picks up Fang by the scruff of his neck and disappears into the willow thicket.

There's an outburst of snarls and yelps, followed by
a highpitched scream of pain. Fang trots
out of the thicket and into the beam of the
Maglite with his eyes glowing red and his mouth
clogged with coyote fur. A Jack Russell terrier,
the coyote has learned, is no bunny rabbit. Bozo
lopes over to greet him, and then follows him as he canters proudly to us to be congratulated.

It happened too quickly for either of us to be
frightened for Fang's safety, and he's unharmed except for
a small cut at the back of his neck
where the coyote picked him up. He'll need a
rabies shot as a precaution, and probably something
stronger to deflate his canine ego.

We walk
on for another half kilometre before turning back,
and this time the dogs, at Esther's insistence,
stay closer to us. It's a good thing. The long
winter is giving up its gruesome treasures
, and not all are as pleasant as the
perfume of mud and poplar leaves. Fang finds a
dead badger by the trail, and is just about
to roll himself in its decaying gore when Esther
grabs him. She has to carry him half the
way home before he forgets about the
badger and tries to lick her face.

We're almost at the door when the
coyotes start howling, no doubt telling and retelling the
legend of the terrible spotted rabbit that looked like a
rat, hung out with a bear, and fought like
a wolverine.

They're still telling the story as sleep
closes in on me, joined by a raven as
their colour commentator, and my alpha waves tune in on the conversation and ride it.

THIRTY-EIGHT

T
HE TELEPHONE IS JANGLING
, and I reach across
Esther to pick up the receiver.

“What is it now?”
I demand irritably. I'm pretty sure it
isn't the Queen calling at this hour, so I don't care who I snap at.

It's Jack, and he's all business.

“How's the backside
this fine morning?”

“Gord's my doctor. You'r
e supposed to be my accountant. And I can answer
a phone, so it must be okay.” I check
the window, and he's telling the truth about
it being a fine morning. “Your dog tangled with a couple of coyotes last night.
”

“I hope the coyotes are okay,” he answers,
unconcerned. “Lis- ten. I'd like you down here in about an hour.”

I check my watch. It's already ten. “How'd it go last night?”

“Chilliwack won.”

“Oh, shit. So we have to play them at least twice today?”

“Well, maybe not. I got a call from
them this morning suggesting we might want to make it a single game, winner take all.”

Esther's awake, staring at me with her eyebrows lifted. “Jack?” she asks softly.

I nod, and lean over to kiss her. She
grimaces and turns away. “Your breath smells
like you ate that dead badger from last night.”

“I did,” I answer. “Snuck out after you were asleep.”

Jack interrupts me. “Pay attention,” he
hollers in my ear. “Are you still in bed?”

I confess
that I am. “Get your butt out of there
and meet us in the Alexander Mackenzie at eleven,” he
says, and hangs up before I can whine.

I'M FIFTEEN
MINUTES LATE
, and never mind why. I've got
Esther's cell phone in my coat pocket so I
can call her with the game times.

A single-game final
would be a piece of luck, if we can swin
g it. I'm not sure why Jack didn't just
say yes to the offer, because it's
to our advantage. The Lions are younger than we
are, and probably better conditioned. If we end
up playing three games, they'll toast us.

When I wander
into the coffee bar and see most of my
teammates there, I understand why he didn't
accept the offer outright. Jack's a democrat at heart,
and he wants everybody there for a team decision. I sit down, order co
ffee, and listen.

Typically, the younger players would like the
whole set of games. They want to win the
tournament, but they also want to play as much hockey
as they can. It's a tougher decision than I thought.
Gus makes the point that given Snell's announcement yester
day these may be our last games as a team,
and maybe we should play as many as we can.

Gord answers that one. “I
don't believe we should think that way,” he
says. “And if we want the team to have a
fighting chance next year, we ought to do
our damnedest to make it hard for Snell
to boot our asses out of the Coliseum. If we
win this tournament,” he adds, “it'll make him think
twice. So which way do we have the best chance?”

It's almost a
rhetorical question, and he emphasizes this by lifting his
left knee onto the table — or rather by trying to, and failing. I can see from Wendel's
expression that he's rounding the corner on this one.

“What do you say, W
eaver?” he asks.

“I'll play as many games as we need to,”
I say, and leave the sentence hanging.

Wendel f
inishes it for me. “But you think we'd have a
better shot in a one-game final.”

“I didn't say that.”

Wendel persists. “But you're thinking it.
”

“Okay.”

“Good enough for me,” he says.

Jack sees a couple of the Lions
enter, including their coach, and he motions them over. “We clear on this?” he asks us.

It's
unanimous, and I breathe a sigh of relief.
Wendel sits down beside me. “So,” he says, teasing,
“my poppa's a putz, is he?” Before I can answer, he drops it. “Wher
e's Mom?”

“She'll come down for the game. As soon as
I phone her and let her know when it starts.”

I watch as the
Chilliwack coach sits down a few tables away to
yak with Jack and Gord. I haven't had a
close look at him until now, and I r
ealize he's Neil DeBerk's younger brother Dave. He must
be in his late thirties now, but the last
time I saw him he was a nasty kid
playing Junior B hockey and trying to hang ar
ound with his older brother and his friends. Me,
in other words.

Wendel and I talk
for a few minutes, and when he decides to
head over to the Coliseum I join Jack and the
Chilliwack contingent. I'm introduced, and listen quietly as
the deal for a one-game final is settled. Their
motive, it turns out, is simple expedience: most of
their players have to be at work on Monday morning,
and a three-game final might not get them
home in time.

With the deal concluded, Dave DeBerk turns his attention to me. “Don't I know you from someplace?” he asks.

I shrug, feeling suddenly weary again.

“Just a move you made — the way
you used the big guy as your screen
in the second period against Camelot. The only other guy
I ever saw do it that way used to play
with my older brother before he died
in an accident years back. Mind you, this kid
had a different set of wheels on him.
One hell of a player, but messed up.”

Gord gives
me a cutting look, then stares out the windo
w. And there it is again, one of
those strands that has been dangling down the middle of
my life for two decades, now resolved in my
favour, even though I didn't stop what happened and
will never completely forgive myself. So do I
reach out here and pull this one in
with the others in front of this man? It
won't help Dave DeBerk to know that a man
who watched his brother die is sit- ting ac
ross from him or that until two days ago
I thought I was guilty of killing him. Esther
knows. Gord knows. My father knows. Someday I'll tell
my brother and my son the story, bu
t not this year.

So no. I'll remain a stranger
to DeBerk. To reveal myself would be imposing my
own need for symmetry, and, like most private
needs, it'd be cruel and selfish. It's enough
that I'm freed of it. It's taken years for
those families to heal from the losses of thei
r brothers and sons. If I stepped out of
my place in their scar tissue, all I'd do is
tear open the old wounds. A totally symmetrical life
is a life without others in it, and a life
without kindness or real love. A real life has loose ends.

So the four of us, Dave DeBerk, me, and my
two closest friends sit around making the smallest of
small talk, until it's time to get ready to play hockey.
Almost as if the past had never been.

ON THE WAY OUT
I punch the digits
of our number into the cell phone and let Esther know we're playing at one-thirty. “It's one game,” I add.

“Well, that's a relief,” she says. “What was the
meeting about, then?”

“Jack did the right thing. He
let all of us decide.” I feel a childish need
to see her. “Can you come down to the
dressing room before the game? I want …”

I can't quite explain what I want.

She cuts me of
f. “I'll see you about one,” she says.

BY THE TIME SHE
arrives, I'm suited up and
the need is gone, swallowed up by the dressing
room's intensity, by the sheer crazy normality of what
we're trying to do — win a stupid hockey
game in a stupid tournament at the far end of
a kind of hockey that's as doomed as the dinosaurs. She
comes into the dressing room, sits down beside me,
and talks to Gord about some social event next
week. More normality. When it's time to go
she tells me to be careful on the ice,
and I give her a peck on the cheek. Then
she pats my new helmet and I stomp away fr
om her down the hallway as if I'm really going someplace important.

As I line up
for my first face-off, I realize that I
don't much care if we win this game —
at least, not for myself. It isn't that I'm ti
red. I'm not. In every other sense, I'm ready
to play. It's just that I'm more interested in playing in the game than in winning it.

By halfway thorough the first period, I've learned somethin
g else: we may not win. The Lions are
the best team we've faced. Man for man they're
faster than we are, they're younger, and
they bang hard enough in the first few
minutes to let us know that they want this game as badly as we do.

Their
best two players are forwards, and one of
them is Paul Davidson, Mikey's nephew. He has
everything you can ask for — speed, puck sense, and
an unpredictability you can't buy. He makes
me wonder why he isn't in the
NHL
, because his
skills are close to Wendel's. The other good
one is the centre on his line. He's a
tall, rawboned kid who doesn't have great wheels, but he's powerful and intelligent. Their defencemen are smaller than
ours, but more mobile. We come off
the ice after twenty minutes huffing and puff
ing, without either team scoring a goal.

A couple of
minutes into the second, I catch Paul Davidson carrying
the puck along our blueline with his head down. He's
looking for his centre, who's snaking in along the
far boards and heading for the net, and
he's completely vulnerable. I have a split second to decide:
I can hit him with a clean check, and quit
e likely put him out of the game. Or I
can dodge him and let him get by me
to make the pass, in which case they'll likely scor
e. I do neither. He sees me at the
last second, and as his head comes up I step
to one side. As he's going by me, off
balance, I bring my shoulder down and clip him
with it so that he loses his balance and the puck, and slides along the ice toward the far boa
rds.

The ref sees a trip that isn't the
re, and whistles me to the penalty box.
It's a bad call, but he isn't about to reverse
it because I whine, so I skate over to
the open door and step in. Davidson skates past the box, spins around, and stops.

“Thanks,” he says. “You could have creamed me there.”

“You're welcome,” I answer
back. “Keep your head up if you want to keep it on your shoulders. Next time I won't be so nice.”

He
nods, and skates away. Nice kid, which probably
explains why he didn't make it to the
NHL
.

Thirty seconds later the nice kid cr
osses the blueline, catches Gus on his heels, puts the
puck between his legs and picks it up behind
him, and flips it past Junior. It's the f
irst time in the tournament we've been behind.

Jack doesn't say much
during the intermission, except to instruct Gord
and Freddy to crash the net more so
Artie can get some skating room, and to tell
Wendel to use his speed to the outside mo
re. He knows rah-rahs aren't going to help us,
and if we get too wired up they'r
e likely to screw up our heads. This
is a game that'll be settled by skill and by the breaks, not with any Knute Rockne nonsense.