The shovel was too damn old, he supposed.
Damn it.
"Watch out, boys," Fergus said with a grin. "Sprague's about to Hulk himself out."
"Har-dee-fucking-har," Sprague said, grinning to himself.
He walked to the penalty box and heaved the broken shovel over into the heap of broken hockey sticks that he kept stacked in the penalty box. He had no real use for the structure. He never bothered to enforce the rules and regulations.
"Win or lose, there's no shame to it," Sprague always told the kids. "Hockey is just a game. Just get out there and play it, hard as you can. I've got a box of bandages if you get hurt."
This wasn't the NHL, after all. No hockey immortals here. Besides, it was a good place to keep the old sticks which he used every summer to stake up his green beans.
"I'll have to get down to the hardware store and borrow me another shovel before tomorrow," Sprague said.
"I'll keep the clerk busy for you," Fergus said.
The garden had always been Helen's concern. When she'd passed on, Sprague let the weeds have their way, but he still kept a patch clear for his green beans. Come summer, Sprague loved nothing better in the world than to sink his teeth into some buttered and salted green beans, fresh from the garden.
Other than that, nothing grew. Some nights when he'd had just a little too much rum, Sprague wondered about digging a hole out there in that garden. Maybe he might just want to lay down in that hole and let the snow cover him up.
So far he hadn't gone through with his plans but there was always hope, now wasn't there?
Wednesday night, 8pm
There was nothing on the goddamn television so Fergus had plugged in a duster from his DVD collection. John Wayne and Kirk Douglas, going toe-to-toe with the War Wagon.
Sweet Jesus, now that was pure entertainment.
Now John Wayne was one hell of a man. He had a right cross that could shoe a mule. Fergus wondered if the Duke had ever played hockey. He bet the old cowboy would have had one hell of a hip check.
Yes sir, John Wayne was a man of no regrets.
Fergus was thinking about Judith Two Bear.
He had intended on meeting her the other night at the tavern, but time just sort of ran away.
"Bullshit," Fergus told himself.
Time hadn't run away.
Fergus had just lost his nerve.
He had planned to invite her home. Not that inviting Judith Two-Bear home was all that much of a trick. Fergus was no fool. He knew full well that Judith Two-Bear was a woman who did not like to spend too many nights alone.
He supposed he couldn't blame her.
He had another drink.
John Wayne shot a few more outlaws.
After a time Fergus drifted to sleep on his couch.
He awoke once and went to the window and he saw Judith standing out there in the snow, but he told himself he was only dreaming.
And maybe he was.
Wednesday night, 10pm
Rufus Timmerman noticed the bus had moved from in front of the tavern and was parked just outside of his front yard.
Yard was a kind word. The bit of property surrounding Rufus's house wasn't more than a scab of scruffy salt grass and the occasional weed that had stubborn enough get-go to grow in the cold gray dirt. The picket fence needed painting but who in their right mind would paint a fence?
Rufus did make a point to paint the house every two summers. A man had to have some sort of pride in his life. He'd boil up a barrel of fish oil and throw in about fifteen or twenty pounds of ochre and boil it for a day or two longer. Then he'd heave in half a gallon of red paint and let it boil some more and stir it when he thought of it.
Rufus was old school when it came to paint mixing. The ochre and oil would soak clear through the shingles and keep the rain out when it poured and pelted down in scads. It brightened up the place considerably and always cheered Rufus when he'd come walking home from a crib game or a dart chuck at Sprague's.
Rufus' wife Maggie never cared much for the ochre's smell. She claimed it reeked of fish blood – the kind of stick-to-your-boogers reek that would like to make a body puke. But old Rufus never paid much mind to the wife's moaning. She'd crank at him straight through high tide and low, no matter how he tended to her worry. The fact was, if the woman ever stopped cranking at him she'd likely stop breathing.
And then where would he be?
The two of them lived alone since young Jimmy had up and moved to Toronto to go to art school. Nowadays Jimmy painted pictures for advertising and portraits for those who could afford his rates and his work hung in several prominent Toronto galleries.
"Why in the hell don't you stay here and paint like your Dad does?" Maggie had asked the boy before he left.
The boy had no answer for her.
Rufus hadn't said a word either.
They got a Christmas card from Jimmy's wife every second year or so. Maggie thumbtacked the card up beside the other cards and the high school diploma that she kept on her side of the bedroom. Her own personal Jimmy-collage, was what Rufus thought of Maggie's collection, but he never said a word to her about it.
In fact, Rufus made it a habit to seldom think of Jimmy at all. He'd up and left and his life seemed to be running fine. A man needs to worry about just what's there in front of him and nothing more.
Rufus lit a cancer stick, sucked it in and hacked out a cough. The red spattered from his lips and stained the porch railing. He let his breath out slowly. He'd been hacking red for three months now, but it still always startled him when he saw it like that, lying out in the open.
"Ah me son," he said to himself. "The crab has got hold of your old windy gas-guts for sure."
It wouldn't be long. He needed no doctor to tell him the sad tale. He'd cough red and then he'd cough black and soon enough he'd be looking at the wrong side of the dirt, like as not.
And then what would she do?
That's when he saw it.
That long black bus parked and idling on the road that crossed in front of his fence. Rufus sized it up. You just didn't see a bus of any kind in this old town. There wasn't bodies enough to fill one, and where would they go once they filled it? He drew in a long slow puff of tobacco and then let it ease out, like he had all the time in the world.
The bus door cranked open. The hinges needed oiling, by the sound of it.
It just sat there, the door open like a gaping mouth.
Rufus threw the cigarette to the porch floorboards and ground it into ash.
"Come ahead if you're coming," he said to whatever lurked in that lonely black bus.
The headlights blinked.
Rufus stood there staring.
He heard something humming. It sounded a little like a woman's voice.
Rufus blinked.
It's time, was what he thought.
Only he didn't think it anymore than Judith Two-Bear had thought her last thoughts. Rufus' thoughts stole up from somewhere deep beyond the instinctual. It rolled up and over him like a gray glacial fog stealing into the mouth of a harbour.
A sudden notion seized him.
He went to the shed and fetched the can of red paint that he'd been saving for the summer to do the house with. He took along his cutting brush as well, that he used to edge paint around the tight spots.
Then he went to the bedroom and stood by the closet door, looking down at his Maggie. She was still a pretty thing for the fifty-three years that she'd walked this dirt. She worried about her weight and her wrinkles and the lines that crow-danced about the corners of her eyes – but he still thought she was beautiful.
He raised the paintbrush up. He'd always wanted to try this, just once, but whenever he asked her, Maggie would get all funny and tell him no.
Now was his chance.
He dipped the brush into the opened paint can and took his first stroke, wondering just what the boy would think of his old man's work. He painted quickly, knowing somehow that he had v
ery little time left to spare. He could feel the eyes of cold Venus staring down from the night sky and nodding in slow approval. He could feel the ghosts of Van Gogh, Picasso and Degas watching as he splashed his soul out upon the dirty bedroom wall.
A little later something came through the front door.
The snow, once again, began to softly fall.
Thursday morning, 10am
"It's colder than a cod's nose out here," Fergus complained.
"About right for a Labrador January, I figure," Leo said.
"Are you trying to crack wise?" Fergus retorted.
"A man cracking wise to a fool is wasting an awful lot of time and energy," Sprague said.
"Pearls before swine," Fergus said, nodding sagely.
"And shit before the shovel," Leo countered. "Are we almost done here?"
Sprague looked about the rink.
"I think it could use one more scraping."
"It's as smooth as a traveling salesman's tongue," Fergus argued. "We ought to water it and be done with it."
"We'll water the ice tonight before the cool turns to cold," Sprague said, ignoring their groaning. "And we need to scrape her one more time."
"Get on with you," Leo said. "It's smooth enough to my figuring."
"Oh yes now and is it?" Sprague said. "And what will you be doing if one of those kids turns an ankle on a missed notch this Saturday night?"
"There'll be no turned ankles," Fergus said.
"You think on that and try and picture that ice, covered in a boy's blood," Sprague said. "And then you think twice, you."
Neither of them had much in the way of an argument to that. Leo and Fergus loved the kids as much as Sprague did.
"This row would be a lot easier to hoe," Fergus put in. "If we had a full crew hauling for us today."
Sprague nodded.
"Where in the hell is Rufus, anyway?" he wanted to know.
"He liked to have slept in, I expect," Fergus said. "The man is as lazy as a cut cat."
Sprague nodded and spit, being careful to aim for the snow on the other side of the boards. Nothing would be allowed to spoil the pure unalloyed immaculateness of his rink ice.
Just where in the hell was Rufus?
Thursday evening, 8pm
Sprague and Fergus and Leo dined on bologna and cheese sandwiches, along with a six pack of Black Horse.
"I've had enough of waiting and wondering," Sprague said. "The rink is clear and the ice needs to be watered."
"And then we get drunk?" Fergus asked, with a grin. "I'll go get the rum."
Sprague slammed his fist onto the counter. The string of garlic bulbs that hung above the window sill fell into the sink with a dull thud.
"No sir," Sprague said. "We are going to go and find Rufus and unless he's dropped dead, we'll bring him here to do his share of the work."
"And then we'll get drunk," Leo added.
"And Rufus can buy the rum," Sprague said.
"Now that sounds like a plan," Fergus admitted.
The walk to Rufus' home didn't take all that long, but the talk added to the length of the step.
"Have you ever thought about retiring?" Fergus asked, as they walked.
"Retiring from what?" Sprague replied. "All I do these days is take care of the rink."
"I'm not talking about work. I'm talking about retiring from the life. Leaving Labrador and maybe going somewhere warm."
"Now that wouldn't be hard," Leo said. "As near as I can figure the North Pole is a sight warmer than the Labrador coastline."
"So where would I go?" Sprague asked.
"I was thinking maybe Mexico," Fergus said. "Somewhere warm and bikinied."
"I don't know about Mexico," Leo said. "I saw a movie about tourists in Mexico who get eaten by cannibals."
"Cannibals?" Sprague said. "Are you sure you aren't talking about Cape Breton?"
All three shared a laugh at that.
"I'm not fooling though, Sprague," Fergus said. "What with the fishing going and me so old I can smell the grave dirt in my shit every morning."
"That bad?" Sprague asked. "Maybe you need to lay off the prunes."
"It gets tougher every year," Fergus said. "I think we might be getting old."
"My dying Jesus," Leo swore. "Now there's a news flash for you."
Sprague just shook his head disdainfully.
"Mind me, now, me son," Sprague said. "Life is going to get harder no matter where you live."
"You figure that out all by yourself, did you?" Leo asked.
"The man's a regular philosopher," Fergus said. "He ought to take his vows and wear his collar backwards-front."
"He does look good in black," Leo agreed. "It thins him, it does."
Sprague wasn't listening.
"It ain't easy and it ain't getting any easier, my son," Sprague said. "Just like the old man used to say – Life is like eating runny chocolate from off of a three-barbed fish hook. You've got to learn to chew carefully, is all."
"Chew on that, would you?" Fergus said, pointing ahead of them.
Sprague and Leo looked. Rufus' front door was swinging open in the winter breeze.
"That's not right," Sprague said. "Not for this time of the year."
Inside the house all was quiet.
"Rufus?" Sprague called out.
The bedroom door was open too.
"Rufus?"
Sprague, Leo and Fergus stepped inside.
The bedroom stank of oil. Oil and something else. There was a bright red painting on the bedroom closet door. It looked to be a portrait of Maggie, Rufus' wife. It was crude, but unmistakable, and anatomically accurate enough to cause Leo to blush.
There was no sign of Rufus or Maggie.
Leo knelt by the closet door. He'd seen something odd.
"What are you fixing on doing now?" Sprague asked. "Praying?"
Leo shook his head slowly.
"So what's the matter?" Fergus asked.
"This last bit of paint, here at her ankle?" Leo said, touching at it gingerly.
He looked up at Sprague grimly.
"It ain't paint," Leo said, straightening up.
The three men stood there in the empty bedroom, not saying a word. Behind them, through the bedroom window, the embers of the night sky roared up as red and bright as a sunrise in hell.
"Shit," Fergus swore, as he turned towards the window. "I think the church just blew up."
Thursday night, 9pm
Father Andrew Tercel parked the church minivan in the gravel driveway before opening the front doors of the church.
The Church of Hope's End was a sturdy serviceable building with a homemade steeple and a bell that had been salvaged from a beached trawler thirty years ago. Father Tercel rang the bell every Sunday and Wednesday to call his flock to mass. Any more often would just get in the way of the fishing.
The priest was praying alone at the altar when he heard the call. It came as a soft sound, like the coo of a dove caught upon the breeze. He felt something calling to him in a low, haunting tone.
Father Tercel stood up, unconsciously straightening his trousers.
He stepped to the doorway.
When he opened it up the black bus was idling in the driveway, its headlights blazing, pinning him there in the doorway.
Father Tercel raised his hand to his eyes and squinted.
He instinctively touched the cross that hung upon his chest.
As if in answer to his gesture the bus roared into life, driving straight towards him, t-boning the church minivan and slamming it directly into the church doorway.
The minivan exploded, a handful of heartbeats later.
For a few minutes the night became day.
Thursday night, 10pm
The town fire team had come out to fight the blaze – a battle which mostly consisted of them watching it the blaze burn down to the cold dirt.
The boys had gone home halfway through the fire.
The rum had come out by the
time they'd got back to Sprague's house. After they opened the rum, Sprague opened a jar of Solomon Gundy. A game of three-handed crib broke out. Cards, pickled herring and rum kept their minds off what had happened.
"Peg, you bold bastard," Sprague swore.
"Fifteen two, fifteen four and his nibs makes five," Fergus counted. "You're skunked again, me son."
"That leaves me out of luck," Leo said.
"I'm not beat yet," Sprague growled, but in truth he was.
The cards were over.
Somebody had to speak.
"So what happened to Rufus?" Fergus asked.
"How the hell should I know?" Sprague answered.
"I've got a better question," Leo said. "Why in the hell did Father Tercel drive the minivan into the church?"
"Maybe he was in a hell of a hurry," Sprague suggested. "Caught short and needed to pee."
"Who said he was driving?" Fergus asked quietly.
By now the church was nothing but ashy ruins. The town Mounties stood around the smouldering debris, trying to figure what happened. Sprague, Fergus and Leo offered their help but the Mounties shooed them away.
"As if we were nothing but kids in the way," Fergus complained.
"We are kids," Leo said. "Eighty-year-old kids."
"We're worse than kids," Sprague added. "We're old."
"Means, to their eyes, we're damn near useless," Fergus added.
"You figure they're right?" Leo asked.
"I figure they aren't wrong," Sprague said. "And I still don't know where in the hell Rufus is."
"Maybe he took sick?" Leo suggested. "Maybe they had to ferry him to the mainland?"
"The Mounties hadn't heard anything about that," Sprague said. "Besides, they were too busy trying to put that fire out by staring at it, real hard."
They poured and sipped on another round of rum.
Sprague reset the crib pegs.
"Deal," he said to Fergus.
All at once Leo looked up. His face went calm, as if he was hearing something like beautiful music.
"Do you hear that?" he asked.
"Hear what?" Sprague asked.
"Nothing," Leo said, shaking his head like he'd been checked too hard against the boards. "Clear as a bell."
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