Muck and Mr. Dillinger were invited to the head table. Sho Fujiwara, recognizing a hockey man like himself in Muck, did a quick switch of the place cards that indicated the seating arrangements so that they could sit together and talk–and Muck seemed to be having a wonderful time of it in this strange, foreign country where his game served as the common language. At one point, Travis even noticed Muck showing Sho a break-out pattern by using the water glasses and salt and pepper shakers to illustrate the Owls’ game plan.
Sho opened the ceremonies with a hilarious account of his own experiences as the Japanese goaltender for the 1960 Winter Olympics in Squaw Valley, California. In Japanese, and then English, he told the kids what it was like to be on the very first hockey team that ever played for Japan, and the pressure they were under. They sailed across the Pacific rather than flew, so they’d have time to work on new skills on the way across. “Not stickhandling,” he said with a wide smile, “but learning how to eat with a knife and fork.”
He soon had the kids screaming with laughter. Each member of the Japanese team had been issued an official Japanese Olympic team shirt and tie for the trip, and they had worn them each day aboard the ship as it had made its way across the ocean, practising three meals a day to do without the traditional chopsticks and eat with the knives and forks they would be expected to use in North America. “We landed in Vancouver,” he said. “First thing we all did was go out and buy a new shirt and tie each. Our official ones we had to throw away, we’d spilled so much food on them!”
Sho then introduced the head table. Besides Muck and Mr. Dillinger and the head of the Lake Placid and the Chinese teams, the mayor of Nagano was present, as was the head of the service club from Tamarack, the head of the local sports federation, and a few local businessmen, including Mr. Ikura, the man who owned the largest of the nearby ski resorts, who stood to extend an invitation to all the teams to come to his hill for a day of skiing and snowboarding–“free of charge”–before the end of the tournament. He was, of course, cheered wildly.
After the introductions, they served the food. Nish insisted he was going to eat his with chopsticks, and made a grand gesture of getting his sticks ready and pushing away the knife and fork that had also been laid out at his plate.
“What’s this?” demanded the Japanese expert as the first plate was placed in front of the Owls.
“Sushi,” announced Sarah.
“I thought you’d have known all about sushi, Nish,” said Jenny.
“What is it?” snarled Nish. “It looks alive!”
“It’s raw,” said Sarah. “Raw fish.”
“Whatdya mean? They cook it at our table, like that steak they do in restaurants?”
“You eat it raw,” said Jenny.
“I’m not eating anything that hasn’t been cooked!”
Travis looked at the plates as they landed in front of him. The sushi looked more like artwork than food. It was beautiful, each piece perfectly laid out on a little roll of rice with small, green sprigs of vegetable around it. On each roll of rice there was a slice of fish, some very pale, some very red, and some, it seemed, with tentacles.
“Is that what I think it is?” Travis asked Sarah.
Sarah followed his finger.
“It’s octopus,” she said. “Raw octopus.”
Jenny, who seemed to know a great deal about sushi, took over. Like a patient teacher, she pointed to each piece of sushi laid out on the plates before them.
“This one is eel.”
“Yuuucckkkk!” said Nish.
“Squid.”
“Yuuucckkkk!”
“Raw eggs.”
“Yuuucckkkk!”
“More octopus tentacle…”
But Nish was already up and scrambling. He had his Paul Kariya cap over his face and was bolting for the far exit as fast as he could move. Travis noticed that Data had pulled up near the table in his wheelchair and had recorded the entire scene. Good old Data–they’d want to show that one day!
Travis couldn’t help laughing. He had seen Nish act like this once before, when the team was visiting the Cree village of Waskaganish and Nish had eaten, without realizing it, some fried “moose nostrils.” But Nish had come around eventually, and had eventually eaten, and enjoyed, beaver and goose and even some moose nostril. He would come around here in Japan, too. He had to. He was, after all, Mr. Japan on this trip. And this was Japanese food.
Travis tried the sushi cautiously. Sarah and Jenny and Lars had no concern about it, and ate happily. Travis chose the raw tuna to start–he had tuna sandwiches most days at school–and it wasn’t bad. He tried dipping it in the small bowl of soya sauce and green mustard that Jenny held out to him. It tasted even better. He tried the salmon and it was delicious. He tried the octopus, but it was rubbery and made his skin crawl–particularly when he bit down on one of the tentacles–and he spat the rest of it out into his napkin and stayed away from the octopus from then on.
Toward the end of the meal, Sho stood up and introduced the mayor, who would be making a few welcoming remarks to the teams.
The mayor rose slowly, seeming to bask in the applause from the assembled players.
He was an older man–but even so, Travis thought, he moved slowly.
As he got to his feet, he seemed a bit unsteady.
Concerned, Sho reached for the mayor’s elbow.
Muck leapt to his feet and rushed to help, his chair tipping over and clattering onto the floor.
The mayor reached for his throat, then plunged straight forward, his face twisting horribly as he fell across his plate, the legs of the head table giving way under him and the entire table–trays of sushi, flower arrangements, glasses of water, knives, forks, and chopsticks–crashing down onto the floor with him.
Mr. Dillinger, who knew first aid, pushed his way through and reached the mayor. He turned him flat on his back, yanking his collar loose.
He bent down, his ear to the mayor’s open, twisted mouth.
He looked up, blinking at Muck and Sho Fujiwara.
“He’s dead!”
Sarah leaned over the chair in the sitting room, her chin in her hands, her eyes red-rimmed from the shock and strain of the hours since the banquet the night before.
“I’ve never seen anyone have a heart attack,” she said.
“My grandfather had one,” said Travis. “But he drove himself to the hospital–it wasn’t like this at all.”
“He looked like he was being strangled.”
There had been no hope for the mayor of Nagano from the moment Mr. Dillinger bent down over him. An ambulance had arrived quickly, and the body had been removed at once, but the shock lingered.
For once, even Nish was quiet. Suddenly electric toilet seats and drinking Sweat didn’t seem quite so funny. They hadn’t known the mayor of Nagano, none of them had even been introduced to him, but he had been thoughtful enough to come out and welcome them to his city.
They were feeling sorry for the mayor and sorry for themselves when the door opened and Muck came in. The coach was dressed much more normally now, in an old tracksuit and his team jacket. But he didn’t look normal. Muck’s face was grey and serious.
“It wasn’t a heart attack,” he told them.
“What was it?” The question, of course, came from Fahd.
Muck took some time answering. Travis, sitting closest to him, could see his big coach swallow several times. A muscle on the side of Muck’s cheek was twitching.
“The police say…he was…poisoned.”
“Poisoned?” Travis repeated, hardly believing it.
“How?” Fahd asked again. “We all ate the same meal.”
“I told you that sushi stuff was poison,” Nish said.
“Shhhhhh,” Sarah ordered. This was no time for Nish’s stupid humour.
“They found traces of blowfish in his stomach,” Muck said.
“Blowfish?” Fahd asked. “What the heck’s blowfish?”
By lunchti
me, they all knew everything there was to know about blowfish. Called fugu in Japanese, the blowfish is able to inflate its body by swallowing water or air so that it swells into a ball. The Japanese treasure the ugly creature as a great delicacy, and chefs are trained for years in how to clean the fish so that none of the poison that is found in some of its internal organs spreads into the flesh. Even so, about a hundred Japanese a year die accidentally from the deadly poison.
“It wasn’t an accident,” Muck had told them. “There was no blowfish on the menu. Someone had to deliberately put it on the plate he was served.”
“Who would want to do something like that?” Fahd had asked.
“The police have taken the two chefs in for questioning.”
Travis’s mind was racing. Why would anyone want to kill that nice old man? Travis had no idea. He knew nothing about the mayor, not even his name. And why would they kill him at the hockey banquet? In front of a couple of hundred peewee hockey players?
It suddenly struck Travis: I am a witness to murder. I have seen one human being killed by another human being. And the way murders are usually solved is by questioning the witnesses.
What did I see? Travis asked himself. Nothing.
What do I suspect? Nothing.
What do I know? Nothing.
“There’s nothing we can do about it,” Muck said after the Owls had discussed the matter at length. “It’s unfortunate, and we are all sorry for the mayor’s family. Mr. Dillinger is sending our sympathies to them. But the matter is now under investigation by the police–nothing to do with us, nothing to do with this hockey tournament. The best thing we can do is move on.”
“Do we know who we’re playing yet?” Lars asked.
Muck pulled out a schedule. He opened it, scanning sections he’d already underlined in red ink.
“Our first game is Thursday morning against the Sapporo Mighty Ducks.”
“The Sapporo Mighty Ducks,” Nish said with a sneer. “What a joke!”
“Maybe the rest of your ‘cousins’ will be on the team,” said Sarah.
“Very funny.”
“Are they any good?” Travis asked.
“Don’t know,” Muck said, stuffing his schedule back into his breast pocket. “That’s why we need to practise. We’re on in an hour–get your stuff. Mr. Dillinger and I have a little surprise worked up for you.”
“What?” Fahd asked.
Muck smiled. “If I told you, it wouldn’t be a surprise any more, now would it?”
Travis was glad to get back home–because that’s how he felt on skates, on ice, in his own hockey equipment, surrounded by his own smell, his own teammates, with everything in its place, everything where it should be. His eyes knew where the net would be without even looking. His shoulder had a sense of the boards. His imagination held a thousand different ways to score a goal.
There is something universal about the way a skate blade digs into the first corner on a fresh sheet of ice, Travis thought, as he took his first spin around the Big Hat ice surface. This was the same ice surface where Dominik Hasek had put on the greatest display of goaltending the world had ever seen. But it felt no different than the arena back home. Travis and the Owls had skated on the Olympic rink in Lake Placid, and they had played in the Globen Arena in Stockholm, where the World Championships had been played–but the sound of his blade as it cut through that first corner was the same as in Lake Placid, in Sweden, the same, for that matter, as on the frozen creek where they sometimes played at the edge of town back home.
On skates, Travis had a different sense of his body. He felt bigger, because of his pads. Stronger, because of his skills. Faster, because his body was pumping with so much pent-up emotion that he felt he needed to play almost as much as he wanted to. Now that he was on the ice, everything felt right: Sarah was sizzling on her skates just ahead of him, Nish puffing back of him as they went through their wind sprints, Dmitri’s skates barely touching the ice surface as he danced around the first and second turns, Lars striding low and wide, the European way.
Everything was right here. Murder did not exist here.
Even Muck’s whistle felt right: music from centre ice. Travis and Sarah cut fast around the far net and headed for the coach, the two of them coming to a stop in a fine spray of ice. The other Owls came in spraying as well, Muck waiting, whistle to mouth, until the last of them–Nish, naturally–came spinning in on his gloves and shinpads, the toes of his skates looping odd circles in the ice behind him.
Travis had raced to centre so automatically that he hadn’t even looked up. He hadn’t noticed that Muck was not alone.
“This, here, is Mr. Imoo,” Muck said, indicating the little man beside him. “He’s a Buddhist priest, so show him proper respect. He also knows his Japanese hockey.”
The Owls stared in wonder. If this was a priest, none of them had ever met another one like him. Mr. Imoo was grinning ear to ear; but his front teeth were missing, top and bottom! He was wearing hockey equipment, but the socks were torn and there seemed to be old dried blood on his sweater.
“Mr. Imoo runs the local hockey club, the Polar Stars–but he’s also a priest at the Zenkoji Temple, which you’ll be touring later this week. Mr. Dillinger met him at the temple and asked Mr. Imoo if he’d mind coming out to practise with us.”
“It is great honour,” Mr. Imoo said, bowing deeply towards the Owls.
Nish, who was on his skates now, immediately bowed back, even deeper, causing Mr. Imoo to laugh.
“I see you already have Japanese player,” he said.
“Half Japanese,” Nish corrected.
“Half nuts,” Sarah added.
“Moshi moshi,” said Nish, ignoring Sarah.
“Moshi moshi,” Mr. Imoo said back.
“I thought Buddhists were non-violent,” said Fahd.
“Not the hockey-playing Buddhists,” said Mr. Imoo, smiling. “But there’s only one of them, me. I lost my top teeth in that corner over there. Keep an eye out for them, please.”
The Owls laughed, knowing the teeth would have long been swept up by the Zamboni, if, in fact, the story were even true–which they figured it was, given how fierce Mr. Imoo looked in his ragged hockey gear.
“Mr. Imoo is going to give you the secrets of playing hockey in Japan,” said Muck.
“Buddhist secrets,” Mr. Imoo grinned. “Very special secrets, only for Screech Owls.”
“Listen to what he says,” said Muck. “And remember it tomorrow.”
“The secret to Japanese hockey is to shoot,” Mr. Imoo said.
“That’s no secret,” Fahd insisted. “Even Don Cherry knows that.”
“But in Japan is different,” said Mr. Imoo. “Japanese hockey very, very different from North American hockey.”
By the time Mr. Imoo was through explaining, the place in Travis’s brain that held his hockey knowledge felt as if it had been invaded by an alien force. It made absolutely no sense–hockey sense, anyway.
Japan, Mr. Imoo explained, is a very formal place. Younger people, for instance, are always expected to step aside for their elders, and it applies as well to hockey. On his team, there are koohai players–the younger ones, the rookies–and the older players are called sempai. The sempai rule the dressing room. The older players sit together, talk together, and bark out orders to the younger koohai players.
“Koohai have to tape the sempai sticks,” said Mr. Imoo, “have to get them drinks when they want them–even have to wash their dirty underwear!”
“Seems sensible to me,” said Nish.
It would, thought Travis–Nish was the oldest player on the team.
“At least that way your long underwear would finally get cleaned,” Sarah said.
But Nish wasn’t listening. He seemed hypnotized by Mr. Imoo. He had moved up close and was standing next to him, nodding at everything the Buddhist priest told them.
“Japanese hockey is trying to change this,” said Mr. Imoo, “but it is very, v
ery difficult to change old habits. On the ice, the younger koohai will never take a shot–they always pass to a sempai to take the shot.”
“Good idea,” agreed Nish.
Mr. Imoo grinned. “This has major effect in hockey. Goaltenders check to see which player is older player and wait for him to get the pass for the shot. Don’t have to worry about younger players.”
“I like that,” said Jenny, the goaltender.
“Goalies also not good in Japan,” said Mr. Imoo. “Everyone is afraid of hurting goalie in practice, so no one shoots–not even sempai. So goalies not get good through practice. That’s why I say secret against Japanese hockey is to shoot puck. Shoot puck, score goal–simple, eh?”
“Yes!” shouted Nish, banging his stick on the ice. Several of the other Owls followed suit. Mr. Imoo grinned widely, the big gap of his missing teeth making his grin all the more infectious.
“You must play like samurai–great Japanese warriors, afraid of nothing, attacking all the time. Okay?”
“O-kay!” Nish shouted, banging his stick again.
Muck stepped back into the centre of the gathering. “We’re just going to scrimmage. But I want to see shots, okay? Lots and lots and lots of shots. I want quick shots, surprise shots, any shots you can get off, understand?”
“You bet, coach!” Nish said, slamming his stick again. Muck winced. He didn’t care to be called “coach.” He said that was what American football players called their coach. Canadian hockey coaches, he always said, went by their real names.
“I need a volunteer for goal,” said Muck. “We’ve only got Jenny here. We need another for the scrimmage.”
“You got one right here!” said Nish, whose enthusiasm seemed to have gotten the best of him.
As one, the entire team turned and stared at Nish, who was about to bang his stick again on the ice, but now was beginning to blush beet-red. “Why not?” he said.
“You said shoot, didn’t you?” Sarah said to Mr. Imoo.
The Complete Screech Owls, Volume 3 Page 2