For three years the team had practised in secret, playing only scrimmages against themselves, but now, this winter, the Hollywood Stars had started showing up at tournaments.
And they had yet to lose a single game.
“Weird,” said Sam again.
Weird indeed.
The three Screech Owls were still hidden behind the rhododendrons and potted palm trees, Sam down on her knees peeking through the legs of the baby grand piano, when the Prince family limousines pulled up.
Travis had seen a display like this once before: in Washington, when the president of the United States came to watch his son, Chase, play in the final game of the International Goodwill Peewee Championship. But this put the fuss over the president to shame. The Princes had a police motorcycle escort. They had a forward car – a black Lincoln SUV – filled with a private security force that piled out as if they were marines moving in on an enemy encampment. They were all big, beefy men with suspicious bulges behind their left arms where Travis figured they must keep their holstered handguns.
The security force swept the street and the front entrance, checking for whatever it is security people look for, then moved quickly through the revolving doors into the lobby.
Travis was certain they were about to be found and, for all he knew, arrested.
But the security force seemed to assume that inside the hotel all was secure. They moved straight to the elevator to check out the rooms as the Prince family entered the hotel behind them.
Travis heard Sam and Sarah gasp.
He leaned out a little further and caught sight of the best-looking young kid he had ever seen: jet-black hair, green eyes, a slightly crooked nose, and, already, the signs of widening shoulders and developing arms.
Behind the kid entered a woman who seemed taller than any of the men around her and had the undivided attention of every one of them. She was extraordinarily beautiful and moved across the room with her shoulders back and her head held high. Her hair bounced as she walked, and her eyes took everything in yet settled on nothing.
Struggling to keep up were staff pushing luggage carts piled high with suitcases – huge silver suitcases that looked, to Travis, as if they should be holding the Stanley Cup, not clothes and shoes.
Behind the luggage carts came a man who was obviously Troy Prince. He wore dark wraparound glasses and had a white surgical mask over his mouth, and he was dressed in a dark suit with a rich white silk scarf hanging loosely around his neck.
He was also carrying a hockey stick.
In all his life, Travis had never seen anything so out of place as this hockey stick in the hand of this man. A hockey stick held by a hand in a rubber surgical glove.
“Weird,” Travis repeated.
“Weird.”
3
Travis had a gut feeling he would have a good tournament.
He was standing at the head of the line, helmet pressed to the glass above the gate leading onto the ice. The Zamboni had just gone off, the ice was still glistening wet under the lights of the Park City arena, and the attendant was closing the chute doors and signalling that the teams could now come on.
Travis was first, just as he liked it. He felt his skate touch the ice, heard the wonderful little sizzle as he dug in hard with his right leg and pushed off, giving his ankle a small flick as the blade left the surface.
Everything had gone perfectly. Mr. Dillinger had all the skates sharpened and stacked in the middle of the dressing room. There had been fabulous jokes about the stink rising from Nish’s equipment bag and lots of talk about the Hollywood Stars and their bizarre owner.
Travis had felt good dressing. He had kissed the inside of his sweater, right behind the “C” for captain, as he pulled his jersey over his head.
Muck had made one of his shortest speeches ever: “There’s no ‘I’ in ‘team’ – you got that, Nishikawa?”
Nish had looked up from his festering equipment bag, red face grimacing: “There’s two ‘I’s in ‘Nishikawa,’ coach.”
“Sometimes it seems like there’s nothing but ‘I’s in ‘Nishikawa,’” joked Sarah from the far corner, causing Muck to smile and Nish to stick out his tongue.
They were up against the Detroit Wheels, a big, tough peewee team the Owls had last met for the championship of the Big Apple International, a tournament Nish claimed he had won single-handedly by scoring on his “Bure” move. He had flipped the puck over the net from behind and skated out in front in time to cuff it out of the air and in for the overtime victory.
Travis hit the crossbar on his first warm-up shot – a good sign that the tournament would go well for him – but he still felt nervous. Nice nervous, not bad nervous.
Tournaments were different from any other kind of play. Travis wasn’t sure why, but in the first game of a tournament it always felt as if his breath came a little quicker, his legs seemed a little more rubbery, his eyes moved just a fraction of a second behind the play.
Tournaments tended to have a little jump to them that was missing in league play. And the other teams and players were generally strangers – you had no automatic fix on them. Travis sometimes marvelled at how the Owls could play a team only a few times in league action and he’d have a sense of who was dangerous and who could be beaten either by speed or puck-handling. Eventually, he wouldn’t even have to see the numbers on the other players; he could tell just by body language who was where when he was on the ice and what they were capable of doing. A defenceman might be back on his heels and make it easy to poke a puck through his skates. A forward might be a lazy backchecker or a sloppy puck-handler. A goalie might go down too much or have a strong glove hand the Owls’ shooters should try to avoid.
In a way, Travis thought, hockey was an endless scouting report, constantly being revised in a player’s brain – often without the player even being aware he was picking up such information.
But in a tournament everything was fresh and new and all the players had to prove themselves as if for the first time. Travis knew it would be just a matter of a few shifts before the other team realized that Dmitri’s speed was a killer, that Sarah was a great playmaker, and that Travis was absolutely ferocious in the corners.
They’d also soon learn that the big, loud, red-faced number 44 on the Owls’ defence was not one player but two or three different players. He could be lazy and seem unimportant on the ice. He could be silly and self-centred, always trying to make the hero play. Or, as Travis liked him best, he could be a totally driven team player, determined to do whatever it took to win.
Travis knew the players didn’t see that third Nish too often – but once they did, they never forgot it.
The Wheels were big, and often played dirty. Travis was slashed right off the opening faceoff, but the referee either didn’t see it or decided to let it go. His right forearm and wrist were numb and tingling, and when Sarah kicked the puck to him he found the arm had no strength. The puck skittered right off his stick and into the feet of the big winger who had slashed him. The winger kicked the puck off the boards, danced around Travis, picked it up, and broke in fast on Samantha and Fahd, the Owls’ starting defence pairing.
Fahd made the mistake of playing the puck, not the man. He stabbed to poke-check the player only to have him neatly tuck the puck back, out of harm’s way, and then flick it ahead, past Fahd.
It was an instant two-on-one, with Sam trying to stay between the two rushing Wheels and Jenny Staples, who’d been named by Muck to start in nets, playing the shooter.
The puck carrier decided to pass. Sam brilliantly fell and blocked it with her upper body, but the puck bounced off her shoulder pads straight back to the passer and – just as Jenny was sliding across the crease to play the one-timer from the other side – he was able to slam it into a wide-open net.
Wheels 1, Owls 0.
Travis was near tears on the bench. His arm was screaming in pain and his bad play had coughed up the puck and led to a goal in the first minute of t
he first game of the tournament.
He felt something being squeezed in between him and Dmitri. He looked down. It was ice, all neatly bagged in plastic and chopped up small so it would pack around his arm.
Good old Mr. Dillinger. Always prepared. No one had even said a word about the dirty slash, but everyone knew. No one on the bench was going to blame Travis for something that wasn’t his fault.
Derek took the next couple of shifts for Travis. He sent Dmitri in on a breakaway at one point, but Dmitri clipped his signature backhander off the crossbar and high into the safety net.
Nish pretended not to see the big winger who had slashed Travis and backed into him, acting like he was playing the puck on the stick of another Detroit forward. The big winger went down hard and play had to be called for the trainer to come onto the ice and help the Detroit player to the bench.
Nish winked at Travis as he came off the ice. Travis smiled. He was ready to play again.
Andy Higgins tied the game 1–1 early in the second with a wicked slapper that hit the Detroit goalie’s glove and both posts before going into the net.
By now, Travis had full feeling back in his arm. It was still aching, and he was icing it between shifts, but his strength had come back and he was determined to make up for the opening goal.
Sarah, who was playing wonderfully, won a faceoff in the Owls’ end and fired the puck back behind the goal, where Nish picked it up and dodged the first check by bouncing the puck off the back of the net as the winger roared past him.
Nish looked up ice, his eyes calm, his face so expressionless it seemed to Travis his friend had gone into one of his trances. He could play, at times, as if hypnotized, as if something else were controlling him.
Nish moved out over the blueline, deftly stickhandling past the opposing centre. He flipped a neat pass to Dmitri by the right boards, and Dmitri fired the puck back almost before it reached him, causing a pinching Detroit defenceman to turn so fast in panic that he lost an edge and went down.
Nish broke over centre just as the ice opened up to the Owls’ rush. The Wheels had only one defenceman back now, and both Detroit wingers were hustling to get back to cover.
It was, for a moment, a three-on-one, with Travis, Sarah, and Nish, the puck carrier.
Nish came in hard over the Detroit blueline, faked a slapshot, and slipped a beautiful drop pass to Sarah, who looped quickly inside the blueline as the one Detroit winger sailed harmlessly past her.
As Sarah circled and looked up, Travis moved into the slot, while Nish, digging hard, came in from the other side.
Sarah sent a perfect lead pass to Travis.
Trusting in his arm, he fired the puck instantly, one-timing it off the ice so fast that the Detroit goaltender, who had seen the play develop, had no time to do anything but position himself and hope for the best.
He hoped in vain.
Travis’s shot went up hard to the short side, over the goaltender’s blocker, and in off the crossbar.
Owls 2, Wheels 1.
This time when Travis went off the ice it was to backslaps and high-fives and, that rarity of rarities, a quick neck massage from Muck, who said not a word. Nothing needed to be said: the coach’s touch said it all.
Only Nish spoke, and it was to remind Travis of something they’d talked about before the tournament.
“You had a chance to do a Lemieux there, buddy,” he said. “Just let that pass go through your legs, and I woulda Kariya-ed it into the empty side.”
“We scored, didn’t we?” said Travis, a little annoyed.
“You scored,” Nish said, raising his face mask and pushing a towel hard into his eyes.
Travis shook his head and said nothing. Nish was being an idiot. Did it not count because I scored it? Travis wondered. Would they have awarded two points if Nish had been able to recreate the famous Olympic goal?
The Wheels tried to come back in the third and almost scored on a rebound late in the period, only to have Nish dive in across the crease, knocking both Jenny and the puck out of the way. The Wheels called for a penalty, claiming Nish had closed his hand on the puck, but the referee would have none of it. In the entire game, he had yet to call a single penalty.
With no danger of whistles, the Detroit team turned nasty as the game wound down. There were slashes and spears and elbows on every play.
“No retaliation,” Muck ordered. “They play their game. We play ours. Understand?”
The players on the bench nodded. They understood. They knew Muck would have nothing to do with this style of play, even if it meant losing.
The Wheels keyed on Nish, who was clearly the most dangerous of the Owls on the ice. They hit him on every play and tried to get him to fight after every whistle. But Nish kept that faraway look in his eyes and treated the Wheels as if they weren’t even there. Finally, with the clock winding down in the final minute, the Wheels began running Nish at random.
He used their strategy against them, waiting for them to charge and then stepping quickly out of the way as one after another slammed into the boards. Then he took off, carrying the puck as if he were all alone on the ice. One Wheel tried to take his feet out from under him, but Nish just kicked the slash away with his shin pad.
He came up over centre, wound up, and crushed a shot from well outside the Detroit blueline that simply blew by the astonished goaltender.
Owls 3, Wheels 1.
The horn sounded with the Detroit team still running the Owls, but there was no retaliation. Muck ordered his team off the ice immediately while he went over to offer his hand to the opposing coach and have a few quiet words with the referee.
The Owls fell into their dressing room exhausted, sore, but happy. Helmets crashed into lockers, sticks clattered over the floor, gloves landed everywhere but where they belonged, and several of the players lay down flat on the floor, as Nish always did, and raised their legs onto the benches.
Nish liked to say it was to “get some blood back to my brain.” And Sam usually added, “We’ll need a massive transfusion for that, then.”
“I hope we never see that ref again!” said Sarah.
“He was pitiful,” said Simon.
“That guy who slashed you should have been thrown out of the tournament,” Jesse Highboy said to Travis.
“I’m okay now,” said Travis, but his arm was throbbing. The pain was rushing back.
Mr. Dillinger came into the dressing room and tossed a fresh ice pack at him. Travis took it, smiling.
The door opened again a second later. It was the official scorer, smiling. “Good game, Owls – we picked number 44 as MVP.”
The Owls all cheered as one.
The man looked around the room, finding Nish still with his legs up on the bench. “Just want to double-check the spelling of your name, son …”
“It’s N-I-S-H-I-K-A-W-A,” Nish told him.
Then he smiled, big red face beaming.
“That’s with two ‘I’s.”
4
Travis had often heard his parents use the phrase “fly on a wall” – but this was more like “hockey player on a wall.”
Simon Milliken was hanging two feet off the floor in the ballroom. He was surrounded by other Owls standing on chairs and working furiously to rip duct tape off several rolls and use it to plaster Simon’s legs, arms, torso, and even head to the wall.
Next to Simon was little Jeremy Billings, being similarly taped up by the Portland Panthers. Another tiny player was being taped by the Detroit Wheels, another by the Toronto Towers, one by the Boston Mini-Bruins, one by the Long Island Selects, and one by the Vancouver Mountain.
Round Two of the Gross-Out Olympics was under way!
“Fifteen more seconds!” Nish barked into his cordless microphone.
“Ten seconds!”
Hands worked furiously. The big room was echoing with the sound of tearing and ripping as the teams tore off strips of duct tape and slapped them over every part of the players’ bodies
to secure them more firmly to the wall. There was tape over pants and T-shirts and socks and bare skin – and even tape over tape wherever possible.
“Five seconds!”
Travis could barely hear himself think for the furious ripping of the sticky tape.
“Four … three … two … ONE!
“STOP TAPING!”
Instantly, the taping stopped, all except for one final tear from down towards the Vancouver Mountain team, which caused a quick round of friendly boos from the other teams.
“Stand back!” Nish ordered.
All the players moved back – except, of course, for those players now plastered to the wall.
Travis giggled when he saw their handiwork. Simon and Jeremy and the others looked like they were floating in outer space against the dark wall of the ballroom, their bodies merely an outline beneath haphazard strips of silver duct tape.
Nish had Mr. Dillinger’s big pocket watch in his hand and was now counting out how long they lasted. “Fifteen seconds!” he called out.
He was standing dead centre, the players taped to the wall to one side of him, the cheering teams on the other.
“Thirty seconds!”
The first sound of tape giving way came from Travis’s left. It brought a loud groan of denial from the assembled members of the Detroit Wheels. The groaning, however, was good-natured – the Wheels seemed a lot friendlier off the ice.
Travis watched the scene unfold in slow motion: first the player’s right arm came away, then, with the shift in weight, his right leg began to strain at the tape and, very slowly, pull away from the wall.
The Wheels groaned again in unison.
“Forty-five seconds!”
The Complete Screech Owls, Volume 5 Page 10