The Complete Screech Owls, Volume 1

by Roy MacGregor

  “They’re worth a total of $86.50,” Travis said. According to Beckett.

  The man smiled. “I’m sure they are,” he said. “But we’re not buying right now, Travis.”

  Travis felt dizzy. Three years of three bucks a week–nearly five-hundred-dollars’ worth of cards at home, and nobody “needs” them and nobody’s “buying right now”?

  “Tell you what,” the man said. “I’ll swap you these for this Fedorov group. Deal?”

  Travis took the deal. But he also took the hint. Cards were worth cards; they weren’t worth money. They had next to no value at all to anyone except for the kids foolish enough to hand over their allowance.

  From that day on, he was, at best, a casual collector. He knew now what his dad had meant when he called the whole thing “a house of cards.”

  “nuqDaq Derek?” Data asked. (“Anyone see Derek?”)

  The group stopped at the corner, Travis about to step off the curb. He hadn’t even been thinking of keeping track of everyone. But they’d been warned by Muck to stick together when they went out. And now Derek was missing.

  “Maybe he went back to the hotel,” Willie suggested.

  “Why would he?” Nish giggled. “I have the TV tools right here.”

  “This isn’t funny,” Travis said. “We have to find him.”

  They backtracked and began checking the stores they’d wandered through. No Derek. Finally Wilson pointed across the street.

  “There’s something we missed!” he shouted. It seemed he’d forgotten Derek. He was pointing to an arcade, the lights flashing inside. The group broke into a run, Nish causing a driver to slam on his brakes and shake a fist at him. Nish shook his fist back and made like a dog barking as the car shot by.

  Derek was inside. He’d seen the lights and wandered off. And when they found him, he was so deep into a game of “Mortal Combat” that he didn’t even notice his teammates surrounding him to watch.

  But that was Derek. Serious to a fault. Different from his father. Travis sometimes wondered if perhaps Mr. Dillinger had too much personality for Derek to deal with. Maybe he took up so much room that Derek had become a bit of a quiet loner in reaction. And yet they had in common their love of hockey. Derek worked so hard at it and Mr. Dillinger, obviously, was very proud of him. Mr. Dillinger was always kidding about when Derek would make the Leafs and how he would have free season’s tickets to Maple Leaf Gardens.

  The boys became so caught up watching Derek play they forgot they’d ever lost him. Soon Nish was bumming more money from the rest of the players so he could join in on the fun, too.

  Travis had only five dollars, and he knew if he cashed it in on tokens he’d be five dollars short in about five minutes. So he held on and watched. Data had ten dollars’ worth of tokens and, as usual, Nish was more than happy to borrow. They played air hockey and pool. They shot baskets. And, of course, they played video games, games so violent his mother would have marched him right out if she’d seen what they were doing to each other. At one point Nish’s character hit Travis’s character so hard he split in half and blood gushed all over the screen and the screen flashed, “Place token in now for extra game. Place token in now for extra game.” But Nish was out of tokens.

  The Screech Owls left in a group, Derek with them, and turned back down toward the hotel, prepared to call it a night. The streets were still filled with people, and Travis could tell the hockey crowd from the locals easily. The locals didn’t look around. They knew where they were going. The hockey crowd was obvious: the jackets and caps, the way kids shouted across the street to each other, the way the parents awkwardly hung around in groups. Why they all felt they had to be friends when some of their children didn’t even like all their own teammates baffled Travis.

  He was tired and the jostling crowds were getting to him. Doors to restaurants and shops and bars were opening and closing on so many different sounds that he felt more that he was in a midway than a small town. He’d be glad to get back to his bed. He hoped Nish’s cheap tools broke on the first try.

  Travis was walking along only half paying attention when, suddenly, he pitched face-first out over the curb and onto the road, a car braking and squealing as the driver yanked the steering wheel hard and away from his sprawling body.

  The impact knocked Travis’s breath out, so he had no voice to add to what he could hear behind him.

  “What the hell was that for?” Nish was shouting.

  There were other voices, unfamiliar.

  “Get a life, fatso!”

  “C’mon, runt! Get on your feet!”

  “What’s the matter? Need your girl here to do your fighting, too?”

  Travis felt as if he’d been punched in the heart. Data hurried to him, bending down, looking concerned. Data dug in his pocket for a Kleenex and pushed it down toward Travis’s eye, and when he dabbed it off Travis could see in the thin light from the street-lamp that the Kleenex was black with blood.

  But there was no pain. He couldn’t breathe. He had felt this kind of pain once before when, flying in behind the opposition net, his stick had somehow become stuck in a crack in the boards and the handle had rammed up into his gut on impact. He felt like he was going to die then, felt like he was going to die now.

  Nish was still shouting: “What a stupid thing to do! What the hell’s wrong with you?”

  The other voice again, this time a little nervous: “I never did nothin’. He tripped over his own feet; you saw it yourself.”

  “I saw you stick your foot out, jerk!”

  Data and Wilson had Travis turned over, Data dabbing with the Kleenex, Wilson pumping Travis’s legs. Why do they always do that? Travis wondered. You lose your breath from your chest, and they pump your legs. Do they think people fill up like bike tires? But, pumping or not, he was already feeling better.

  “You’re going to need stitches,” Data said. “There’s a big hunk of flesh hanging out.”

  Now Travis could feel his head. It was like the pain was racing from his lungs to his head and arriving twice as large as when it had left. He could feel his right eye already swelling.

  “You okay, buddy?”

  That voice again. Travis opened his eyes and looked up, the head peering down at him lighted from behind so it seemed black and featureless. He could not make out who it was.

  “Help me up,” he said.

  Data kept pressure on the cut. Wilson grabbed one arm and the faceless stranger the other.

  “Get your hands off him, jerk!” Nish shouted, trying to move in.

  Travis felt himself yanked as the two fought over possession. Then he heard Data’s high, shrill voice, bringing order.

  “Shut up! Just everybody stand back! Come on, now! Stand back!”

  All but Data and Wilson did. Travis stepped back up onto the curb and shook his head, Data’s hand moving with the shake. He could see that a crowd had gathered. He could see his teammates–more than he had set out with–and he could see several vaguely familiar faces. The little blond defenceman who had winked at him was there, his hands jammed in his Panthers’ jacket pockets, looking concerned. The big dark centre, looking scared: yes, his had been the face peering down that Travis could not make out.

  “Sorry about that, buddy,” the big dark centre said, his voice milky with sincerity. “Neither one of us was looking where we were going, I guess.”

  Nish pushed in, violently shaking his head. “That’s bullroar, Trav. This yahoo stuck his foot out on purpose–”

  “Did not–”

  “Did so!”

  “Up yours.”

  “Up yours, jerk.”

  “Quit it, now! We have to get this cut looked at, okay?” Good old Data, the high-pitched voice of reason.

  Data had hold of one of Travis’s arms, Wilson the other. They were trying to lead him away, but the big dark centre pushed past Nish.

  “Look, buddy, I’m awfully sorry about the cut. No hard feelings?”

  He had his
hand stuck out to shake. Nish’s face, peering from behind, looked like a twisted-up sponge. “Tell him where to stick it, Trav–”

  But Travis was confused. A hand offered should be a hand taken. He reached out, realizing his own hand was already shaking, and the two players made clumsy contact. The big dark Panther centre was smiling, relieved.

  “Sorry, okay?”

  “What the hell’s going on here?”

  Travis knew this voice. It was Mr. Dillinger. He was pushing through the crowd, taking charge even before he had arrived. Travis was relieved to hear the familiar sound of someone who always knew the right thing to do.

  “Travis Lindsay! What the dickens happened to you?”

  Data explained the obvious: “He’s got a cut forehead.”

  Mr. Dillinger moved right in, taking the Kleenex from Data and lifting Travis’s chin and examining the cut under the weak light. “This’ll need a couple,” he said. “What happened?”

  A dozen voices answered at once:

  “We bumped into each other by accident–”

  “–tripped on purpose–”

  “–hit his head when he slipped–”

  “–pushed–”

  “–stupid curb–”

  “Hold it!” Mr. Dillinger shouted, holding up both hands like a referee. “Travis, what happened?”

  Travis probably knew least of all. His head was now screaming in pain. “I guess we accidentally bumped into each other,” he said. “And I was the one who went down.”

  “Travis–” the voice of despair, disbelief, the voice of Nish.

  Mr. Dillinger had no more interest in the story. “Come on,” he said. “I’ll take you to the hospital. Data, you come along to check the bleeding.”

  This night it was Travis’s turn to get no sleep. The doctor at the emergency ward had frozen the area around Travis’s cut, stitched it up, and, for nearly two hours, Travis hadn’t felt a thing. Mr. Dillinger had stayed with him the whole time. Travis felt so grateful to him. Mr. Dillinger had been coming up from the rink when he’d noticed the commotion and gone across the street to check. Good old Mr. Dillinger, always on duty, always there when they needed him. Muck had let him handle the situation entirely, as usual. Muck ran the team on ice, Mr. Dillinger off.

  Travis was fine at first. He had even gotten a kick out of watching, out of his one good eye, Nish desperately trying to remove the protective metal coupling from the back of the video box so he could plug the cable line directly into the television and, according to Nish’s plan, watch all the forbidden movies for free. But the coupling wouldn’t give. The cheap pliers broke. And by midnight Nish had given up in frustration and Travis had started to cry from the rising pain as the freezing left. He couldn’t even turn into his pillow to hide the tears. Anything touching his forehead, even soft cotton, was like a coal jumping out of a campfire onto his skin.

  Data called Mr. Dillinger, who came with some painkillers the doctor had given Travis, made him take two, and after a while Travis had dozed off into a half-sleep, half-stupor. He didn’t even know, or care, if the bathroom light was still on.

  He’d dreamed–imagined?–he finally met up with his long-lost “cousin,” Terrible Ted Lindsay, and the two of them had compared stitches. Since these were Travis’s first three, he was only about four hundred short of his hero, but Terrible Ted had smiled, half his teeth gone, half broken off, and told him hockey stitches were like military ribbons and that even if Travis only had three, he now had proof he had served and served well.

  Travis was confused. Was he asleep? Awake? Did three stitches from falling–being pushed?–off a street curb in Lake Placid equal three stitches from a corner punch-up with Rocket Richard? He thought not. Terrible Ted, grinning from ear to lopsided ear, thought so. After all, it was a tough hockey opponent who had given them to Travis.

  He dreamed his father came home from the office with news that the Simcoe Construction crew working on the town renovations had uncovered a variety store that had been boarded up after a fire in the 1950s and had somehow been completely forgotten. His father wanted to know if Travis was interested in going down with him to take a look at what they’d found.

  Travis was certain it had happened: he and his father driving downtown and stopping outside a boarded-up front, the construction foreman welcoming the two of them with white hard hats the way they did whenever Travis went along with his father to a site, the big plywood coverings coming off the doors.

  The lost store had looked so real: a metal cigarette sign over the door, tinted yellow plastic on the windows, a display of huge five-cent chocolate bars inside, and a tub of soaking wet, ice-cold tiny Cokes and ribbed Fanta orange drinks and tall Muskoka Dry ginger ale…

  And there, tucked in under a glass cover that lifted up, three full boxes of Parkhurst Hockey Cards, 1956-57!

  Travis’s father, smiling, had handed the boxes over to Travis and Travis had ripped the cards open: Gordie Howe, two Terrible Teds, Boom-Boom Geoffrion, Rocket Richard, Tim Horton, Jean Béliveau, Jacques Plante, George Armstrong…dozens and dozens and dozens of hard-edged, mint-condition cards packed in with even harder forty-year-old gum. The Gordie Howe might be worth two thousand dollars! The Rocket Richard five hundred! The Plante a thousand! Terrible Ted? Priceless, to his cousin, Terrible Travis.

  But then Travis had surfaced from this wonderful dream and gone over it carefully to see if perhaps it really had happened, and remembered that was the one season, 1956-57, when no hockey cards came out. Not only did the lost store not exist, but the cards could never have existed, even if the lost store were somehow real.

  Travis felt something on his temple and brushed lightly with his hand. A tear, but from the pain of the cut or from the pain of waking up to reality, he could not tell.

  All through the night he drifted in and out of weird, impossible dreams. Travis with the Stanley Cup. Travis in jail. Travis with a hippopotamus living in his back yard. Travis shot in the forehead by Nish’s character from the video arcade…

  “Rise ’n’ shine, boys!”

  It was Nish, first up for once. He was up and spraying them with cold water from a water pistol he’d somehow sneaked into the room. The others dove under the covers. Travis tried to dive, but his forehead hit the sheets like they were a goal post.

  “Owwww…Owwww, owww, owwww–”

  “Hey, c’mon, Nish, not Travis!” Good old Data. Last night’s nurse. This morning’s guardian.

  “We’re on the ice at ten,” Nish said, packing the pistol into his pyjamas. “Let’s go.”

  They began to get ready. Travis sat up, the pain increasing as he tried to get a grip on where he was and what had happened to him. Everything seemed fuzzy.

  “Wow!” Nish shouted when he looked at Travis. “Look at you!”

  Travis got up, the pain now shooting, and headed into the bathroom where he looked, blinked, and looked again, into the mirror.

  The figure was somewhat out of focus, but it was him. At least it was half him. One side of his face looked normal, the other black and purple and swollen hideously over the eye. The eye itself was all but closed. He looked a million times worse this morning than he had last night.

  “You look like Sarah,” Nish called, giggling from the other room.

  No way. Sarah looked in perfect shape compared to this.

  “Maybe you should sit this one out.”

  Travis heard what Muck said but couldn’t understand why his coach was saying this. Mr. Dillinger had taken one look at Travis’s face at breakfast, shaken his big beard from side to side, and hurried off to consult with the coaches. Muck and his assistants had come back, stared, touched everywhere on Travis’s face but where the stitches were, and looked concerned.

  “If the decision were up to me,” said Mr. Dillinger, “I’d say no.”

  Muck wasn’t sure: “We’ll check again just before game time.”

  By four o’clock the swelling had gone down considerably. Mr. Dilling
er checked Travis before the rest of the players arrived and figured he’d be playing. “Couple of days from now, you won’t even be able to find it,” he teased.

  “I want to play,” Travis said.

  “We need you,” Mr. Dillinger said. He seemed pleased that Travis had come back so fast.

  “I gotta go work on some skates,” Mr. Dillinger said. “You may as well start getting dressed.”

  Travis was happily pulling on his underwear when Muck came in, took one long look at him and decided that Travis had better sit out the game against Duluth.

  “I’m fine,” Travis said. “Mr. Dillinger says the swelling will be gone in two days.”

  “And in two days I might need you. I won’t need you tonight. But if we get into the final, I’m going to want you there. You get hit again today, even with your mask, that cut could open up again. Besides, you can barely see out of that eye.”

  “I can see.”

  “You can see well enough to watch.”

  Mr. Dillinger came whistling back into the room, carrying pairs of sharpened skates in each hand and under each arm. He stopped whistling when he saw Muck and Travis in deep conversation.

  “Travis won’t be dressing,” Muck told him.

  “He won’t?”

  “Maybe next game,” Muck said, and wheeled away.

  Mr. Dillinger caught Travis’s eye. He shook his beard in quick disagreement. “I thought for sure you’d play, son,” he said.

  He seemed genuinely unhappy with the decision. Travis felt good that someone, at least, was as sure as he was that he needed to be out there if the Screech Owls were going to win.

  Travis sat with the Screech Owl families and hated every second of it. When the teams came out for the warm-up he wanted to be out there ringing his good-luck shot off the crossbar. When they lined up for the opening face-off, he wanted to be out there with everyone in the building, aware that he, Travis Lindsay, number 7, was in the Screech Owls’ starting line-up.

  But now his place was taken by Derek Dillinger, with Sarah back at centre and Dmitri on right wing. Derek was a good winger but a better centre, and Travis wondered how he would fit in. He found himself half hoping he wouldn’t, but then realized what he was thinking and shook off the thought. Travis’s not playing had nothing to do with Derek, who was merely filling in where the coach told him to. And Derek, Travis knew, would be far happier knowing Travis was on the wing and he was back at centre, even if it was second-line centre.