The Horn of a Lamb

by Robert Sedlack

  Ryan tromped inside Eddie Shack. Fred packed a snowball, glided closer and whipped it at the door. “You no-good snake-in-the-grass, couldn’t even thank the guy who helped you get better, even though I should have been out knocking on doors getting hard cash for something more important.”

  Fred turned. Taillon had appeared, head tilted to the side, trying to figure out what Fred was up to, talking so passionately to a wooden shack. “Well, it’s true,” said Fred. “And you’d be mad, too.”

  Fred went to fish the puck out of the net. There he found a hockey stick, and along the shaft in silver felt pen, Thanks Fred, Ryan Feniak #10. “Buh, buh, look what he left me.”

  Fred skated over to Taillon, knowing the Great Pyrenees would amble away. To Fred’s astonishment, the dog didn’t move. Fred came within a metre of him, and it was Fred who stopped, almost out of embarrassment for having broken the sacred perimeter. It was like standing next to a unicorn.

  Taillon’s head was more massive up close. His eyes almond-brown, and unnaturally wise. The shoulders, rippling with muscle, were taut and strong. The hair was so thick and soft Fred almost fell asleep just looking at it. There was no question what Fred wanted to do. His left hand reached out gingerly. Fred was inches from touching Taillon. His hand shook with excitement. Suddenly the door to Eddie Shack cracked open and Ryan ambled over to his mother’s snowmobile, fired up the obscenely loud snow machine and roared off. Taillon turned and trotted back to the barn.

  Fred put Ryan’s stick over his shoulder, lost in his own thoughts of thank yous, Taillon and God. Then he remembered he had a country to save.

  five

  Fred sat in the passenger seat with a plastic bag nestled in his lap. The bag was heavy. Every so often he lifted it, jiggled the weight and sighed. “Um, um, do I cramp your style?”

  “I don’t have much style to cramp, Fred.”

  “C’mon, you know what I’m talking about.”

  Jack knew exactly what Fred was talking about and he turned the radio on, hoping that Fred would chase his hatred of country music instead.

  “Do you think that you and Mrs. Feniak will, you know, tie the knot and tell me to hit the road, Fred, and don’t you come back any more, buh, buh, you like her?”

  “Sure.”

  “And she likes you?”

  “I think so.”

  “Okay, okay, so next time you need the house you just let me know and I’ll make like a ghost and disappear, maybe give me a secret signal or something.”

  “Jesus Christ, Fred, let’s not get goofy.”

  Fred lifted the bag and patted the side. “I have tried to put her big boobs out of my mind, buh, buh, I can’t.

  “Me neither.”

  Fred blasted his double-barrelled laugh and Jack smiled and lit a smoke.

  Fred watched as Jack finished filling out the deposit slip. “You’re sure this is right?” asked Jack.

  Fred compared what Jack had written to what he had on a scrap of paper. “Um, um, perfect.”

  Jack pushed the deposit slip under the window. Fred dumped the contents of his plastic bag into the bevelled tray. It quickly filled with rolled coins and bills, mostly fives and a few tens.

  The teller counted quickly, Fred watching her every move. “Four hundred and twenty-seven dollars and thirty-five cents,” she said.

  Fred checked his scrap of paper again. “And that might make the difference.”

  He had been canvassing at night. Jack drove him when he could. On the nights when he couldn’t, Bridget or Mrs. Feniak did it. Fred had let Bridget kiss him on his lips, which made her very happy. Fred seemed kind of pleased himself. Until he remembered what Jiri would do to him if he ever caught them kissing. Then he shuddered. Fred’s donation was the result of eight nights of soliciting.

  The line behind Fred and Jack was long, mostly anxious children with their parents. The bank had been overrun since school had let out. Children were emptying their piggy banks and bringing their money in, a scene repeated across the city.

  In each bank there was an hourly update. In the bank where Fred made his deposit they had a simple easel with a giant piece of grey poster paper. And on this paper a number was written in fat felt pen: $6,746,892.23.

  Fred told Jack to wait when he saw it was four o’clock. A teller emerged from behind the glass partition, and everyone watched as she tore the paper from the easel and wrote the new number: $7,108,642.38. A cheer went up, mostly from the children. It was just like the Jerry Lewis Telethon.

  The faces of the children in line were full of hope. The faces of the parents were amused but respectful of their child’s wishes. They still had $10,891,357.62 to go. The Easter Bunny might not have been real, but no parent wanted to ruin this holiday by saying they didn’t believe.

  The man leading a group of smartly dressed men and women outside the bank and yelling, “It’s Fred Pickle, lock your doors and hide your women!” only created confusion because the man was not somebody Fred knew.

  “Um, um, I don’t believe it.”

  Jack couldn’t believe it either. What little hair Badger had left had been trimmed, his face shaved. His black leather shoes reflected the sun on this unusually warm day. In an Armani suit and a colourful tie, Badger looked like a distinguished Southern gentleman.

  The real money to save the team was being found inside the boardrooms of the city’s corporations. Badger’s warning had come true. Most companies were reluctant to lose twenty percent of whatever they might invest. But Badger had been hard at work and each day the sum grew larger. And each day the trepidation lessened. They were still a long way from eighteen million dollars, but Badger kept everyone believing that they would make it to the top of the mountain.

  Fred inspected Badger’s jacket front and back, hoping to find a thread or a piece of lint. When finished, he rendered his verdict. “Um, um, perfect.”

  Fred did notice something that wasn’t perfect. Badger’s face. It was drawn and tired. A week’s worth of meetings had taken their toll on the eighty-one-year-old man. He looked tired, and Fred told him so. Jack agreed. Badger reminded Jack of Muhammad Ali fighting Larry Holmes: too old to be in ring, too stubborn to know better.

  “Buh, buh, tell me that we’re going to make it.”

  Badger dropped a hand on Fred’s shoulder. “We will make that man look ridiculous if it’s the last thing we do.”

  six

  The signs of spring that were warming hearts in the farms and ranches were inescapable and, for Fred, unbearable: Jack pulling Fred’s new mountain bike from the garage, oiling the chain and checking the tire pressure; snow around the farm contracting, revealing patches of brown earth; birds in the trees, chirping, torturing Fred with their cheerful songs. And worst of all, the state of the rink.

  Fred had just completed a solitary skate and his pristine ice was pimpled and soft. A premature dog violet had dared to poke its purple head through the ice, an action that resulted in immediate and malicious decapitation from the blade of Fred’s hockey stick.

  Compounding Fred’s sense of desolation were the daily reminders from the media that without more corporate investment the drive to save the team would fail. It made Fred angry that these companies couldn’t dig as deep as most of the children were doing when they donated their life savings in their piggy banks.

  Time was running out. Fred’s team was slipping away. His rink was melting a little more every day. While the rest of the community rejoiced in the warm breezes of spring Fred slammed the door on Eddie Shack, stalked to the back door, slammed that and pounded up the steps into the kitchen.

  Jack had his glasses perched on the tip of his nose, his cheque book open and bills scattered across the kitchen table. He had thought if he paid his bills at the table instead of at his desk he might escape the torture. He hadn’t. It wasn’t just the taxes or the payments for health, farm, house and truck insurance that broke Jack’s spirit from time to time. It was the vaccinations and alfalfa hay. And then the
gas and electricity. When Jack was scribbling numbers into the debit column of his cheque book it was best to steer clear. Fred had either forgotten this or was in too rotten a mood to care.

  “Um, um, I don’t suppose we could go collecting this afternoon?” Fred began heating some milk on the stove.

  “Not today,” Jack mumbled and waited, coiled like a cobra, for Fred to ask again. And when he did, Jack was going to bite—tell Fred that making money for the farm was a hell of a lot more important than a hockey team. Tell him that if he asked one more time to go collecting, he would string him up in the barn.

  Fred dropped himself loudly into a chair. “I am so bored. Is there not a single thing you can think of that will keep me busy?”

  “Empty the tin of cigarette butts by the barn.”

  “Maybe something a little more challenging?”

  “Go see if there’s any eggs in the chicken house.”

  “I already did.”

  “I’ve got a bag of alfalfa pellets in the back of the truck. You could take it to the barn.”

  “Those bags are too heavy.”

  Jack’s fist hit the table. “Goddammit! I just gave you three things and you won’t do any of them!”

  Fred tilted back and his eyes blinked uncontrollably. “Gee whiz, you don’t have to get so mad, okay?”

  Jack saw that Fred was scared. In a few hours he would wage another battle with his guilt. He came up with another suggestion and hoped, for both their sakes, that Fred would pounce. “Why don’t you write that rink fella back? He wrote you a nice letter.”

  “Buh, buh, that would mean I would have to use your typewriter, oh, please, please, please.”

  Jack nodded and Fred offered a half-hearted laugh and shuffled to the desk. “You can lie,” said Jack. “Don’t tell him you don’t remember him. The paper’s in the drawer.”

  Jack heard Fred tugging on the drawer. “Um, um, where is the key?”

  “Coffee mug.”

  Jack heard the clink of the key, the click of the lock, the squeak of the metal drawer. Fred returned to the kitchen, Jack’s .38 Special pointed straight at Jack’s foot. “What in the hell are you doing?” asked Jack.

  “I want to shoot again when the snow is gone.”

  Jack’s panicked face took a moment to settle down. His first reaction had been that Fred was going to blow him to kingdom come, commit suicide and the whole tragic event would be blamed on Fred’s head injury and the fact that his hockey team was as good as gone.

  Jack grabbed the gun from Fred and opened it. Five bullets sat in the chambers. Jack emptied them into his hand. Fred swayed. And Jack did a little as well.

  “Buh, buh, I did not load it.”

  “I did.” Jack handed the empty gun back to Fred, heart pounding, cursing himself for not unloading the gun after chasing Ryan’s dogs off. “Remember what I told you.”

  Fred thought really hard. “Always think there are bullets inside because you never know, someone may have forgotten to unload it.”

  Fred stuck a sheet in the typewriter and sat staring at it. He took a sip of hot milk. Thought a little. Took another sip and started typing. “Um, um, there’s no ‘y.’”

  “It broke off.”

  “Hey, hey, do you think our lives would be simpler if our ‘whys’ broke off?”

  seven

  Now that Fred had his mountain bike he was able to continue canvassing on his own. Jack didn’t really want him out on the roads so soon after the spring melt, but at least Fred agreed to honour their long-standing rule: he wouldn’t ride after dark.

  Fred riding his mountain bike was not the miracle that skating was. By tilting the bike toward him he was able to swing his left leg over it. In one frantic motion he would slam his left foot onto the pedal and wobble forward. His left foot did the bulk of the pedalling and his left hand did the steering. His right foot and hand, just like they had been for half of Fred’s life, were simply along for the ride.

  Fred attached a giant team-logo flag to the rear of the bike and even put on a team-logo jacket and cap. He couldn’t remember if he had already been to many of the houses he stopped at. It turned out he had. He pushed further away from Jack’s farm and further away from people who knew him. Jack had warned him that struggling farmers and ranchers weren’t all that concerned with the plight of Fred’s team. A cattle rancher told Fred to go to hell. Fred pitched a clump of dirt at the rancher’s name that arched across the entrance to his property.

  Only days remained until the deadline. Fred was convinced that every loonie would make a difference, so he rode from dawn to dusk.

  Fred made regular stops at Jiri’s. When Jiri was home, Bridget fed him sandwiches, shortbread cookies and encouragement. When Jiri wasn’t home, she rubbed his naked legs with canola oil and fed him grapes.

  A truck pulled up. It was Mrs. Feniak hauling two refrigerators. She looked a lot happier than Fred. “Did you hear?” she asked excitedly. “Dairyland just put in two hundred thousand. We’re over sixteen million. I think we’re going to make it.”

  The pain in Fred’s leg immediately disappeared. He was too tired, however, to blast Mrs. Feniak with his trademark laugh. Instead he just smiled. “I knew it all along.”

  Jack had been out of the house for most of the afternoon. After dropping off half a cord of firewood thirty kilometres away, putting up the walls of a hay shed, feeding the chickens and filling the feed troughs, he replaced a dead headlight on his truck. It was dark when he kicked the sheep manure from his boots. He saw that Fred’s bike wasn’t leaning against the wall.

  His inclination was to hit the roads and start looking for Fred but he decided to hit the playback button on the answering machine first. There were two messages. The first was from Fred’s father.

  “Hello, little brother, George here. I assume you guys read the papers today. Is this Hoffman guy Fred’s friend? It’s gotta be. The uranium mine was in Saskatchewan, Jack, not Alberta. You tell Fred to stay away from that old fart and if he starts squawking, then have him call me. I’ll set him straight. You hear that, Fred?”

  The second message played. The voice was hoarse. “Um, um, I did not do so well today, buh, buh, you would have been proud of me for getting over fifty dollars from the stingy farmers, okay, okay, I was picked up by Mrs. Feniak. We are going to Ryan’s hockey game and she reminded me to call and leave a message and I will eat something there and see you when I get home, okay, bye.”

  Jack shuffled to his recliner. He missed Norman climbing out from under the couch and onto his chest. He began wondering again what happened to the carcass.

  Jack was too tired to drive to the service station and buy a newspaper. The timing of the article bothered him until Dink came over and jumped into his lap. He managed three short scratches on the cat’s head before the purring tipped his neck and brought sleep, sweetly and suddenly.

  In spite of being asked by more than one person if Badger was a terrorist, Fred had been enjoying the midget hockey game. And it had nothing to do with the excitement of a tight playoff game. Or the buzz from Bridget’s cookies that was slowly wearing off. It was Ryan.

  He had been used on regular shifts in the first period. But with his team behind three games to none and down four goals going into the second period, the coach double-shifted him. And Ryan responded with four goals and one assist. It might have been his finest period. At least that’s what Kenton said. You could sense it from the crowd as well, that something special had started to happen.

  Even Mrs. Feniak came up from the catacombs of the arena to watch her son once she heard what was happening. She was wearing a marcasite pin in the shape of a butterfly. She had already endured Claudia’s endless questions about who had given it to her and had refused to tell her it was Jack.

  The other team managed one goal in the second, so the third period began with the two teams tied. Now, with thirty seconds left, Ryan took the puck from his own end, crossed the blue line and zigzagged through three
defenders. The crowd joined Fred and came to its feet. Ryan came hurtling down the left wing. He had an opposing defenceman in front of him and a teammate wide open, going to the net.

  Fred slapped his fist, “Pass, pass, pass.”

  Ryan wired a slapshot at the upper-left corner of the net. The puck missed, ricocheted off the glass and slid toward centre ice. An opposing player picked up the gift deflection, skated in alone on Ryan’s goaltender and roofed the puck into the corner of the net.

  There was still enough time to win the faceoff and get one more rush up the ice, but as soon as the puck dropped Ryan tossed his gloves, grabbed the guy who scored the winning goal and started punching him. Fred sat down.

  Both benches cleared and fans littered the ice with garbage. The donnybrook lasted ten minutes before order was restored and the teams were escorted off the ice by referees, fathers and a policeman.

  Fred, Mrs. Feniak and Kenton worked their way silently to the dressing room. They expected they would have to wait while Ryan and his team suffered their defeat privately behind closed doors. But there was Ryan, a big smile on his face, talking to a man with bushy eyebrows. Fred marched over. “Um, um, what are you doing?”

  Ryan grimaced and looked the other way, as he often did when speaking with someone he thought was important and didn’t want thinking that Fred was someone he knew. “Hey, Freddy, take a hike, I’m talking to Mo.”

  “Buh, buh, your teammates are inside and some of them are not lucky like you to have a team to try out for next year and this might be the last time they play organized hockey and you should be in there with them because tonight your team is more important than talking to Mo or Curly.”

  “You got a big mouth,” said Mo. “You must be Fred.”

  “You got bad breath, you must not floss.”

  “Jesus, Freddy, this is Mo from the Wheat Kings.”