The Last of the Lumbermen (6 page)

When
I get back to the car with the sticks bundled under my arm, she's already sitting inside tapping
her fingers on the elbow rest, her eyes still cloudy
with annoyance. The stew she's been simmering since we left the
Coliseum is about ready to serve. I can't recall
having seen her this annoyed at me, and I'm ready
to do anything she demands. More than. I'll
shave my head. Wear day-glo pink undershorts. I'll marry her
and adopt Wendel. Anything.

She lets me have it the moment
I get into the car. “You've really got to straighten things out with
Wendel,” she says.

“Okay,” I answer, with perfect sincerity. “I will. How?”

“How the hell am I supposed
to know that? You're a guy, and
this is a guy thing. But if you want to
go on living with me, you've got to get along with our son.”

I shake my head. “What did you say?”

“I meant
my son. You know what I meant. It just slipped
out …”

Her voice trails off, and, amazingly, she
begins to cry. What the hell is going on
here? If I didn't know better, I'd be
tempted to say it was woman trouble — that time
of the month. But it isn't, and besides, she isn't
any different than usual around that time
of the month. Esther Simons isn't a woman who cries unless
there's a pretty damned good reason.

I reach over to
comfort her, but she pushes me away. “Listen, Sweetie,”
I mumble, “It's okay. Why don't we go someplace
and have a drink. Would that make you feel better?”

“Maybe,” she says, and buries her face in
the handkerchief she's pulled from her purse.
I start the car and steer it slowly through the jumble of the parking lot.

SEVEN

W
HEN ESTHER IS ON
her game, watching her chase a
mara- schino cherry around a glass full of bourbon
and grenadine
is one of my ideas of
fun. But an hour in the bar and two Old
Fashioneds doesn't brighten her mood, and I don't learn anythin
g about what's gotten under her skin except that she's
more upset than pissed off, and that she's
seriously upset about something she can't — or won't — talk about.

So I sip
my soda water and let the hour slip by clinking
ice cubes around the glass, staring out the window
, and letting the painful silences grow longer and mo
re painful. I keep thinking about one of Esther's
pet theories — the Freudian Slip one, about how nobody
ever says anything they don't mean. Personally I think that's
going too far, but she takes it seriously.
I know that with all the things I'm hiding from
her we're knee deep in banana peels here, but damned if I can zero in on the one I've slipped on.

So I look to see if there are
any banana trees: is this about her wanting us
to get married? Maybe. But why hasn't marriage come
up until now? If that's what this is about, I've
got the answer: we'll get married.

Does she want me to adopt
Wendel? I'd go with that too even if it doesn't make sense. Wendel is over nineteen, and adoption probably isn't even legally possible at
his age. And he'd never agree to it.

“Let's go home,” she
says, finally. “This isn't working. I think I need to be alone for a while.”

“Okay
. But I wish I could figure out what
to say to make you feel better.”

“This isn't your fault,”
she says, not quite meeting my eyes — and thus confirming
that it most certainly damn well is my fault. “Just give me a couple of hours and I'll be fine.”

It's
a pointed hint that I should make myself scarce
for a while, so I help her put away the
groceries when we get home, watch a few minutes
of the Hockey Night in Canada pre-game, and then
announce that I'm going down to the Coliseum to work
on the new sticks.

“How about I pick up some Chinese on the way home?”

“Fine,” she says.

I press a small kiss on
her forehead but don't put my arms around her. “See you about eight,” I whispe
r. She doesn't answer.

I WALK OUT OF
the house without my car keys, and instead of going back
inside to retrieve them — it seems important that
I not appear to be a bigger nitwit than I al
ready do — I get into the car and dig
under the seat for the spare set I keep
hidden under the mat. The keys are there, and
so, surprise, is a wallet. I pull it out, dump
it on the seat beside me, and flip it open.
It's Wendel's youthful kisser staring up at me from
behind the plastic driver's licence panel. I close it, and
make a mental note to phone Esther from the
Coliseum so she can let him know I have it
— not that he's likely to miss it. Wendel never
spends money, and he's too much like Jesus for the cops to pull him over.

By the time
I arrive at the Coliseum Gord has left, but
Jack is still there. He's on the phone with the dry cleaner, trying to get the team uniforms out before tomorrow's game. He isn't
having much luck.

I wave to him as I enter and
he waves back, distractedly. I plunk the new sticks down
on the bench, place the first one in the set
of wood clamps mounted on it, and poke through
the toolbox for the wood rasps I keep there.

Jack slams the phone down.
“ Stupid idiot,” he grumbles. “I told him we had two home games this weekend, but he never listens.”

The
dry cleaner is Korean, formal and polite the way
all the Koreans around here are. I
take my personal cleaning to him, he hasn't lost anything
so far, and my clothes come back without being shredded by his machines. Most of the time, anywa
y.

“He listens okay,” I point out. “He just
doesn't understand everything you say to him. Be reasonable.”

“Well,” Jack grumbles. “I don't like his attitude.”

“Who gives a damn about
his attitude?” I laugh. “You're using him because
his dry cleaning prices are thirty percent cheaper than anyone else's.”

Jack sighs. “I know, I know,” he says.
“But Jesus H. Christ, can't anything ever go right around here?”

“It's the
North,” I say. “Everything is supposed to go w
rong. Any- way, we can wear our away uniforms. We've done that before.”

Jack takes this as
an invitation to complain about the uniforms and the team
name, both of which he hates. “You'd think they could
have named the stupid team properly,” he says.
“Mantua Mohawks. What kind
of a stupid name is that when there isn't
a real Mohawk living this side of the Quebec border?”

I've sat through this rant dozens
of times, but it's fun to see what variations he'll add
to it. I also know the history. The name
came from Jack's predecessor as GM, Wilf C
ruikshank, a trendyheaded city alderman when the Memorial Coliseum was built.

“I mean, what's the name got
to do with anything except alliteration?” he continues. “Might as well have been the Hopis, or the fucking Pueblos.”

“Or the Apaches,” I cut in. “At least they speak
the same lan- guage root as the native people a
round here. And anyway, you know why we're called the Mohawks.”

“Oh yeah,
sure. So Cruikshank could put those chintzy Taiwanese Chief
Wahoo crests on the jerseys.”

Cruikshank owned a surplus clothing outfit,
and it's a popular theory that he got our
original uniforms, along with a two- hundred-year supply of
Chief Wahoo crests, on the cheap. Still, I can't
help myself. “Well,” I say, “Maybe Cruikshank
was a Cleve- land Indians fan.”

“I don't give a purple crap
if he was Chiang Kai-Chek's long- lost br
other,” Jack roars, taking the bait. “We're
not a bloody baseball team, and
it's looked stupid from the beginning. I don't
know what was wrong with calling us the Lumbermen
like they used to.”

We both know the answer to that one.
The Lumbermen were the team that used to play
in the old wooden arena before it fell down,
and someone, probably Cruikshank — together with the
same large minds who decided that the new ar
ena ought to be a “Memorial Coliseum” — decided to come
up with a new, catchy name for the city's hockey team.

“Didn't they change the
name because the Lumbermen lost all the time?”

“Well, so do
we,” Jack snaps, “and we have to do it with
Chief Wahoo plastered on the fronts of our stupid jerseys.”

I don't take this as a
personal affront the way Jack does, but I'm not
going argue it with him. The uniforms are
otherwise pretty much the same black, red, and
white of the Chicago Blackhawks, and they're better looking
than the former Soviet National team uniforms the Roosters are
currently using — Ratsloff probably got those
off one of his Russian relatives, who are
sure to be the Russian version of the
Canadian branch of the family. And they're a
hell of a lot more attractive than the bright
purple and white jobbies the Stingers have, or the baby blue and yellow of the Bears, which Gord tells everyone they bought from
the Ukrainian National Gay team.

It's time to change the subject before
Jack blows a fuse. “So what's the juice on the Ratslo
ff twins?” I ask. “I take it they got out
of jail, or you wouldn't be fussing over the uniforms.”

Junior, our ducking goalie, walks in as I'm asking
the question, and he answers for Jack.

“Yeah,” he says. “The cops agreed
to let the twins out and the Ratsloffs agreed not to burn the town.”

“That's close,” Jack concurs. “Who told you?”

“I been monitoring police band.”

Junior, whose real name is Don Young, J
r. — hence the nickname — has come in to complain to Jack about his pads again. He does this about once
a week, and rarely gets past the non-door of Jack's semi-office.

“You'd better come in here,” Jack says to
him, flashing a wink in my direction at the same
time. “No doubt you've got something interesting to tell me.”

Junior is a
second-generation goalie, and he has his job because his
father, Don Young, Sr., was the goalie
for the old Mantua Lumbermen. I think there's a part
of Junior that would rather skip playing hockey and
spend his time pissing around with ham radio
and running his father's appliance repair shop, but
the old man won't let him. For Don Sr. hockey
was a manhood thing, and he insists Junior play the
game the same way he did — with- out a mask.

This
is not without its problems for Junior. Like
most people, he has a perfectly sane instinct to duck when
small, rock-hard objects are directed at
his head at high speeds. Naturally, every- one in
the league knows this — they've known it for forty
years, because Don Young, Sr. had the same instinct
while he played. The difference is that Young
Sr. played in the era before the slap-
shot was invented, and the game still had a few
unwritten rules. In the old man's day, two or three pucks a game might stray above the goalie's shoulder in an average game.
This being the era of cheat, lie, steal, fight with pipe
wrench, every second shot taken at Junior is aimed
at the bridge of his nose. He's just lucky most
of the bozos in this league can't shoot straight. As it
is, he's has taken eighty or ninety stitches in the head since I've been around.

The good side — the
re really isn't one, but we pretend ther
e is — is that on shots along the ice Junior
is decent. So what if Stan Lagace, his backup, is
a better goalie? So what if there are
better goalies playing Peewee and Midget on Saturday morning? After
forty years the Youngs are a Mantua tradition. Besides
which, Jack and Don Sr. are old friends.

This one-sided argument has been
going between Junior and Jack for about two years now
. Junior wants the team to pay for some new,
lightweight pads — probably oversized, if I know Junior
— and Jack is either too cheap to shell out
for them, or he has a side deal with Don S
r. not to mess with the family equipment, all
of which Junior inherited from his father when he
retired — including the undersized brain.

JACK AND JUNIOR ARE
in the
office a long time. I hear them raise their voices several
times but I don't really listen — I know
which way this one is going to come out. Just as
I'm finishing the third stick, over an hour later
, Junior comes out with the predictable long face.

“Fucking cheapskate,” he mumbles as he passes me.

“Why don't
you ask him for a goalie mask,” I suggest, “and
then settle for new pads when he refuses?”

Junior stops and turns around. “Because the pervert
probably would buy me a goalie mask,” he answers.
“Just to screw with me. And then,” he turns again
and heads through the doorways, “where would I be?”