The Last of the Lumbermen (36 page)

As we're gathering our equipment to head back to
the ice to finish it, I bang my stick
against a locker. “Okay, you guys. Let's win this one for the Gimp.
”

James is standing behind me. “Oh yeah?” he wants to
know. “Which one of you guys is the Gimp?”

I see Stan, who's fully sober
for the first time in a couple of days,
scratching his head. “Isn't it supposed to be ‘The Gipper
' we win it for? And what the hell is a gipper, anyway?”

Everyone hits the ice laughing.

WE HAVEN'T HAD
THE
tempo of this game down, maybe because it's too
tight and tense to have a tempo. But as the
period reaches the five-minute mark Jack shortens the lines, and
we begin to pick it up. Maybe it's Gord and
Freddy crashing the net, but the Chilliwack defencemen begin
to back in, and the openings appear, small at first,
then larger. Artie ties it eight minutes in
with a high stickside wrist shot the goalie doesn't see
because he's got five hundred and fifty pounds' worth of
green monsters obstructing his view.

On my next shift
I lose another face-off, but Paul Davidson gets
careless and banks the puck off the boa
rds toward our zone — and right to
Gus a step inside our blueline. I see the play
in the same instant Gus does, and so does W
endel, who heads down right side. Gus steps over
our blueline, hits me with the pass at theirs, and
I'm behind their forwards with just a single defencema
n to beat. I know where Wendel is going
to be without having to look, and I know
he's in the clear because I hear the defenceman who's
in position move for me and I can feel the
other one chopping at my forearms with his stick.

I put the puck
on my left skate, reach back, and yank the
defenceman's stick out of his grip. Then, before he
can wrap his arms around me, I flip
the puck to Wendel with my forehand. In
one move he puts it in the short side, and we're ahead two to one.

The Lions start running around in their own zone,
and we pour it on. With five minutes
left we're up four-one. Gord scores
both goals without touching the puck with his stick. Artie,
I swear, deliberately banks both shots off his behind.

“Christ,” I say to
Gord when there's just a couple of minute
s left and Jack sends out the third line,
“we're about to win a hockey tournament for this crummy town.”

He gives me his best meathead grin. “Yeah. Life
can really surprise a guy sometimes, can't it?”

Maybe it's because I may
never play a serious game of hockey again in
my life, but I want back onto the ice. I
want to be out there when it ends.

Jack sees the
two of us talking, and, for the last minute, puts
us on the ice together with Wendel on the
right side. We get ourselves crossed up and
the Lions score a second goal, but that doesn'
t matter.

Nor does it matter that I lose
my last face-off. Wendel picks up the puck
behind our net, flies down the ice without anyone
touching him, and gets the goal back. I don't make
it as far as centre ice before he
puts it in the net, but that doesn't matter eithe
r. I'm cruising, watching my son, watching the sun set.

THE FINAL BUZZER SOUNDS
,
and it's over. Mantua has won its own tournament for
the first time, and I'm going to have my photo
graph in the lobby a third time — even
if it's only for a couple of years until the
new arena is built, and the Memorial Coliseum is torn
down, and the photographs land up in somebody's base
ment, and what we did continues to exist only in
the diminishing republic of human memory. Screw all
that. This moment belongs to us, and we skate around
the ice like we've won the Stanley Cup.

Is it
bittersweet? Not at all. Jack set up the referees
to select the tournament all-stars, but he hasn't thought to
get anyone to present the tournament trophy. He wasn't about to let that shit-head Snell take the honour — or
more likely, being an habitual pessimist, he thought he'd
be presenting it to someone else. While Larry Godin
calls the tournament all-stars down — most of them are
already on the ice — Jack spots Greg
Friesen, the manager of the television station, and scrambles over
to talk him into making the presentation. It's an out-of-measu
re payment for the lousy coverage his station gave us,
but at least he's wearing a suit and can speak an English sentence or two without garbling it.

The refs
have selected Wendel, Artie, and a big right winger f
rom the Raiders to the first team, together with a
slick youngster from Hinton and one of the guitarists
from the Murder Squad on defence. The Chilliwack goalie, whose name I never do get a bead on, is the first team goalie.

Junior is the
second team goalie, JoMo Ratsloff makes second team defence
— there was probably a death threat
involved — and Gus is the other defenceman. Paul Davidson
is the second team left wing together with his centr
e, and Freddy is the right winger.

They ar
en't bad choices, not far from mine, except maybe
I'd have put Dickie Pollard on instead of Gus or
JoMo. Gus'll look better in the photo, so I guess
that's okay. Jack's already taken care of
the important thing. This time the photographs are going
to be black and white, so the future can't turn us lime green.

Friesen gives a short speech to the rapidly
thinning crowd and hands over the trophy,
which Gus promptly grabs out of Gord's hands and
won't give it back, skating around the ice with
it and performing credible imitations of Serge
Savard's spin-o-rama move whenever anyone tries to take it f
rom him. And eventually, because we can't
stay out on the ice and be heroes for
ever, we skate over to the gate and, one by one, leave the ice.

Someone pops the corks on a couple
of bottles of cheap champagne and sprays them a
round, but the television crew has already packed
it up and, without them around, no one is
very interested in acting like jackasses. It occurs to me that if we could get rid of all the television cameras in the world there'd
be a lot fewer jackasses to put up with.

A few guys shower —
mostly those who've had the champagne squirted over their heads. Others
don't, including me. Esther comes in after a discreet
interval, smiling. It's really her I want more than
a shower. I'm already in my street
clothes, bundling my equipment into my locker. I plunk the
helmet she bought me on a hook inside, close
the door, and reach for her hand. “Let's go home, babe. I'm about done with this.”

“No
you're not,” she says. “Your father and Clai
re are outside. They're taking us out for dinner.”

“What about Wendel?”

“Him, too,
of course. Gord is invited, and Jack, if he's
got the time.”

She's right. I'm not done, and we're
not done. Spring is com- ing, I've got a family
to take me out to dinner, and there
are things to do, things to be. They're going
to be new things, different, and difficult, some
of them. Maybe the only thing I'm done with is hocke
y.

Who am I kidding? Maybe I'll coach a Midget
team next fall, maybe teach them — and their parents
— not to be jerks. There's a challenge, if ever I've seen one.

Hard
to say what the rest of us will do.
Go on living, I guess. I catch Wendel's eye
as I'm pondering this. He grins back, but says nothing. W
endel could do anything from here. Go back
and play in the
NHL
, or stay here and
work the claims he's staked, grow old, and maybe
drop a tree on his head someday if
there are any left big enough to
give him more than a slight headache. But whatever he does, he'll do it with his family around him.

Christ, it's got me biting my lip thinking about all
this stuff. Yeah, I can now imagine a futur
e, and I can imagine it without getting frightened or sentimental.
Let the liars tell their lies, let the fools pump
up their megaproject paradise. In the end, every damned one
of them will collapse, not because the ground beneath us is unstable the way Cranberry Ridge
is, but because the future is here, among the
things we can renew and rethink and rescue
from the rubble and waste we've already
made. Let the young play their games. That's their right,
their job, and their burden. I've got the rest of a life to work on.

THIRTY-NINE

T
HAT'S THE STORY OF
the last Mantua Cup tournament
and the story of my life, as much of it
as I know. Other people might tell it
differently, I guess, but that would make
it another story, someone else's. There's just one more thing I want to add.

The wedding will
be in May. The only thing we haven't fig
ured out is what James and Wendel are
going to be doing during the ceremony. I
keep teasing Wendel that he ought to be the ring
bearer, wear a velvet suit with short pants.
I know James would like to be the best man, but
that job has to go to Gord because he
is, you'll agree,
the best man
. The others
— there will be lots of them — will
be ushers, I guess, and ush people. And there
will be a hush over everything and everyone as I slip
the ring onto Esther's slim, strong fingers, because the world, for once, will be as it ought to be, and as it is.