“Yes!”
“Yes!”
10
“You might not believe this,” Chase Jordan was saying, “but I’ve lived here nearly two years and I’ve never seen the sights of Washington.”
A group of the Owls were walking away from the building holding the Smithsonian space travel exhibits and back toward the park and the Washington Monument. They looked the same as always: peewee hockey players in team jackets, all of them bobbing along with their fists rammed into their windbreaker pockets.
Travis wished he could step back a moment and see if he could notice anything different about them. They were boys and girls, all around twelve years of age, some a bit bigger than others, and some standing out for other reasons – Sam’s flame-coloured hair in a ponytail, Nish swaggering like he owned Washington. No one, however, would ever have noticed number 17 for anything other than the curly red hair that bounced out the back and sides of his Screech Owls ball cap.
That this was the son of the President of the United States would never have seemed possible. Wilson even wore a red maple leaf cap instead of his usual Screech Owls one so people would know this was a team from Canada. And they were sightseeing like tourists. Who would ever expect a member of the First Family, who lived there, to be walking around Washington gawking at the sights like he’d never been here before?
But that’s how it was. The Jordans had a dog, Nixon, but even it was walked by the Secret Service. “I was surprised they didn’t hook Nixon up with a plastic earplug,” Chase said at one point. Travis liked him at once. He was funny. He made fun of himself. And he seemed grateful to be included as part of the gang.
Travis knew they were being watched. It made no sense just to let Chase go out wherever he wished with the Owls. Once, Travis even thought he saw Earplug himself, walking along the souvenir stands, drinking out of a water bottle and seeming to talk into his wrist as he did so. But still, they were giving Chase a little space. Fahd bought a couple of Stars-and-Stripes Frisbees and they kicked off their shoes and played on the grass in their bare feet. Willie and Fahd and Data even came up with a new game called “Frisbee hockey,” and they divided up into teams, put out some runners for goal posts, and played for a good half-hour.
Chase Jordan was a good athlete. He could run almost as fast as Sarah, and he had a natural gift for throwing the Frisbee so it shot down, skimmed the ground, and then up again perfectly into another player’s hands. He ran and laughed and shouted for passes, and after the first few minutes of play, it was like he’d always been an Owl.
Out of breath and damp with sweat, they broke for drinks from a little stand at the side of the road. Travis was chugging an ice-cold Snapple when he noticed Mr. Dillinger and Muck coming along from the opposite direction.
“Time you kids saw The Wall,” Muck said.
“Been there, done that!” called out Nish, causing the rest of the Owls to laugh and Muck and Mr. Dillinger to look baffled. They didn’t know that in Lord Stanley Public School back in Tamarack, kids who talked too much or acted up were sent to stand and face a wall to get a grip on themselves before returning to class. Some even called it “Nish’s Wall” in honour of its most frequent user.
“I want you to show a little respect, Nishikawa,” Muck said. “Hard as it might be for you to think about anyone but yourself, this is where you need to do it.”
They began walking across the grass. Travis felt a presence at his side. He glanced over. Chase Jordan, the President’s son.
“I’ve been a couple of times,” Chase said. “But always formal things – my father speaking, that sort of thing. I always wanted to come myself but never got the chance.”
Travis wasn’t sure what Chase Jordan was talking about. He knew enough about Washington to know that the wall Muck was taking them to was the memorial to the Americans who had been killed in the Vietnam War. He’d seen a picture of it – rectangular black granite slabs sitting on the grass – and, to tell the truth, he hadn’t been much impressed.
They could see The Wall now. It looked, from the distance, much as Travis remembered. Vertical black granite slabs banked into the grass. There was a walkway alongside it for visitors, and it was dug down so that, as the tourists walked along, the slabs rose above them and they seemed to disappear into the earth.
“Bor-ring!” a familiar voice hissed in Travis’s ear.
“What do we see next?” Nish whined. “A tree? A stick? A real, genuine stone? I can hardly wait.”
Travis said nothing. He was afraid of being overheard by Muck or Mr. Dillinger, who were walking ahead of them each with his hands clasped in front like he was walking up the aisle in church.
Like the rest of the Owls, Travis just followed along. He let his mind drift as he began heading down the walkway.
It took a while for Travis to realize what he was passing by. First, there were just short granite slabs with a few names on them, and every now and then a date. It seemed so long ago. Nineteen fifty-eight. Nineteen sixty.
But as he began moving through the 1960s, he began to understand why it was that the walkway seemed to go down deeper into the ground. The granite slabs were rising high above him – and the number of names began growing and growing until, by the mid-1960s, he could no longer see where one year ended and the next began. There were names by the thousands. By the tens of thousands.
And then he began noticing the tributes. A small withered rose was the first that caught his attention. Someone had laid it at the foot of a slab, and he saw that there was a note attached. Travis looked in both directions. Farther along the walkway there were more flowers, some quite fresh, and more notes, and people were reading them and even photographing them. He leaned down and opened the note. It was from a woman. Her handwriting was beautiful. She had attached a picture of herself smiling and holding a small baby, a new photograph. The note was to her father. She wanted him to know that he had become a grandfather.
“I’m thirty-two now, Daddy,” the note read. “Ten years older than you were when you went away forever. I would give anything to see you again for even a moment. There’s someone here you should meet – Mom says he’s just like you.”
Travis dropped the note. He felt as if he had invaded someone’s privacy. The smiling woman and the little boy who wouldn’t know his grandfather. But then, why would this woman have put this note here if she didn’t want people to know?
Travis swallowed hard and moved on. There were dozens of notes. There were bouquets of flowers. He came upon an entire family – children, parents, grandparents – taking pictures of each other as they stood, in turn, and touched one of the names that had been carved into the black granite. The older people were crying, the younger ones seemed uncertain how to react.
It was here where Travis first saw a person take a rubbing. A woman had something that looked like wax paper laid over one of the names and she was rubbing furiously with what seemed to be a thick crayon. The name was coming through onto the paper exactly as it appeared on the granite.
He now saw that there were many people taking rubbings. There was even a stand where paper and crayons were being given out to anyone who wanted them.
He was walking backwards, watching these people, when he backed into the wheelchair. At first, when he heard the clang and felt the handle as he turned, he figured it would be Data. He was already apologizing when he saw that it wasn’t Data at all. It was an old man. He had a scraggly beard and was wearing a military shirt with decorations over the heart. His sleeves were rolled up to reveal dark blue tattoos.
Travis knew he should have been frightened, but he wasn’t. He knew the person he’d just slammed into should have been upset, but he wasn’t.
“Help me out, dude?” the man asked.
Travis thought he must want to be pushed somewhere. “S-sure,” he said.
The man fumbled in a bag slung from the side of his wheelchair. He pulled out some wax paper and a crayon. “I can’t reach it,” he said.
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Travis looked into his eyes. They were clear and blue and full of pain. It took some effort to look away. The man’s stare was hypnotic.
“What do you want?” Travis said.
“I need a rub to take home to Alabama,” the man said in a drawl that sounded, at first, made up. “And I can’t reach it, dude. You’ll have to do it for me. Okay, soldier?”
Travis felt foolish being called “soldier.” He was no soldier. Soldiers were tall and stood at attention like they did up at Arlington Cemetery guarding the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. And they wore perfectly pressed uniforms, not Screech Owls jackets. And not torn and scraggly uniforms like this man wore. If he wasn’t in a wheelchair, and if Travis hadn’t felt sorry for him, he would have thought the man was a … bum. That’s it, a bum.
“I don’t know how,” Travis said.
“It’s not rocket science, dude,” the man laughed. His teeth were black, some of them missing. “Just put the paper over the name and rub.”
Travis looked up. The names seemed to stretch into the sky.
“Which one?”
“Dougherty, C. A.” the man said. “Private Charlie Dougherty.”
Travis looked along the list of D’s rising before him.
Doyons, D. F.… Dover, P.L.… Dougherty, C. A.
“There,” Travis said, pointing.
The man nodded. “My brother,” he said in his deep drawl. “Not my brother in a court of law, dude, but my brother in ’Nam. We served together. I just lost my legs. He lost everything.”
The man said it all so matter-of-factly it seemed unreal. Travis couldn’t ask him anything more. He stretched up and started rubbing. He started with the “D” and marvelled at how it soon seemed to move off the wall and onto the paper. No wonder people wanted to take the names home with them.
Travis stretched and rubbed and the man kept talking.
“Charlie was the funniest dude you ever could imagine,” he said. “They shoulda made a TV show of the things he did over there. Twice as funny as anything you ever saw on M.A.S.H., I’m telling you.”
Travis had to know. “What happened?”
“Charlie ’n’ me and our platoon were on patrol. I stepped on a mine – last step I ever took, dude – and Charlie was the one who came back to drag me away. Carried me on his shoulders, dropped me in the medics tent and dropped dead himself. Sniper’d shot him while he was carrying me and he never even flinched. Charlie saved my life, dude – with his.”
All Travis could do was nod and continue rubbing at the letters. His mind was swimming with the images this old ragged-looking man had put there: the exploding land mine, the friend running through the smoke and gunfire to rescue his buddy, knowing he’d been shot but knowing, too, he had to get back or they were both dead …
Travis knew nothing of war and what it could do to people. Suddenly it seemed absurd to him that, during the Stanley Cup playoffs, the announcers would talk about hockey games as though they were wars and battles. No one ever had their legs blown off in a hockey game. No one ever sacrificed his life for a teammate. There were no whistles or horns to make a war stop. War had no scoreboard.
But it did, too. It suddenly hit Travis that this was what the Vietnam memorial was all about. It was the home-side score from a terrible war, each name a permanent loss.
He could no longer think of it as granite slabs. It was the place where this scraggly old man in the wheelchair could once again be with his buddy and thank him for what he did.
“Eighteen years old, dude – never even had a damned chance.”
Travis shivered. Eighteen years old was “draft age” in hockey, an age Travis and Nish and the others sometimes dreamed they were, with their lives as NHL players just about to begin. But for Charlie Dougherty it was already over.
Travis’s arms were killing him. He felt ashamed of himself. He wanted to quit because his arms hurt. Charlie Dougherty hadn’t quit even after being hit by a sniper’s bullet.
A big thick hand came over the top of his head and pushed against the wax paper. A second big hand reached in and took the crayon from Travis.
It was Muck.
Muck saying nothing, just reaching to take over from Travis.
Muck staring straight ahead, refusing to look down.
His big hands shaking, although he had not yet begun to rub.
11
Travis was amazed at how quickly Chase Jordan seemed to have become best friends with Nish. To Travis, they were direct opposites: one red-headed, one dark; one slim, one a bit heavy; one quiet, one loud; one seeking to escape the spotlight, one willing to do anything for attention. But then, had he not read somewhere that opposites attract?
By day’s end, the two very different peewee hockey players seemed lifelong buddies. They had toured The Wall together, had played Frisbee hockey together, and had even stuck together when Mr. Dillinger took them all off to Dave & Buster’s, a special, three-storey extravaganza of video games, sports fun, and restaurants. Mr. Dillinger called it “A Special, Once-in-a-Lifetime Stupid Stop.”
They had virtual reality battles and played all the latest video games. They ate hot dogs and hamburgers and fries, and Nish taught Chase how to regulate his belches after chugging an entire Coke so he could walk along and burp loudly every third step. During lunch, Nish told Chase about his many adventures with plastic puke and X-ray glasses and nude beaches, and then he and Wilson taught Chase a trick they claimed they’d invented in Tamarack: cupping their palms together, squeezing out the air, and then flexing their hands to produce quick little farting sounds.
“Works great in class,” Nish said as if he were giving a university lecture on the art of hand-farting. “Teachers never know who’s doing it. Drives them crazy.”
Chase Jordan listened intently, his eyes wide and his mouth hanging open. He mastered the “art” of hand-farting and was soon belching and burping and snorting like a Nish understudy in a play called The Most Ignorant Twelve-Year-Old on the Face of the Earth.
What would the President think? Travis wondered. Never mind that, he told himself. What would poor Mrs. Nishikawa think, her son corrupting the son of the President of the United States?
But he knew the truth. Mrs. Nishikawa would think it only natural that a member of the First Family would fall for the charm of her one and only darling son. And if there was trouble, she’d think it was the President’s kid who had corrupted her little angel.
It hardly surprised Travis at all when Nish announced, just before the Owls all tucked in for the night, that he had struck a special deal with Chase Jordan.
“Chase’s gonna pay me back for all I’ve done for him,” Nish announced after the light was out.
Travis bit his tongue. “All I’ve done for him?” Travis repeated to himself. Where did Nish get off thinking this was all his idea?
Fahd, however, couldn’t resist. “How?” he asked.
Nish lay in the dark snickering to himself.
Finally, Travis was caught. He had to know. “How?” he said, slightly annoyed.
Nish sighed deeply, immensely satisfied with himself.
“The Old Nisherama’s gonna streak the White House.”
12
The Screech Owls were playing again at the MCI Center, but this time it was not a Swedish team from Stockholm, it was the hometown favourite, the one team that was getting all the news coverage: the Washington Wall.
“Will the President be there?” Fahd had asked on the drive over to the rink.
Mr. Dillinger had shaken his head. “He won’t be there. If I had to choose between a hockey game and leading the Western world, I’d probably pick the hockey game – but that’s why I’m not President.”
“But what about the final?” Fahd persisted.
“He’s supposed to come,” Mr. Dillinger said, “but I doubt there’s billboards up all over the world telling people not to kill each other on Sunday because the President’s got to go to his kid’s hockey game. If he c
an be there, I imagine he will. If he can’t, it’s no big deal.”
But everything seemed like a big deal anyway. They got to the back of the rink and, again, security was everywhere, just like when they first arrived. Their bags had to be checked by the sniffer dogs, and they discovered that a strange arch had been erected just inside the door, with police tape funnelling everyone through it.
“What’s that?” Lars had asked.
“Metal detector,” said Data. “Same as at the airport.”
One by one the Owls and their equipment went through. The players had to empty their pockets of metal and even take off their windbreakers so the zippers wouldn’t set off the alarms.
Travis and Sarah were right behind Nish as he started through.
Nish was barely halfway through the detector when red lights began flashing and an alarm went off.
Instantly, there were guards everywhere.
“Looks like it won’t let a tin brain pass,” Sarah giggled into Travis’s ear.
“Or a lead butt!” Travis added.
But none of the security force was laughing. A stern-looking woman stepped forward. “Empty your pockets!” she ordered Nish.
Nish complied, his face reddening the deeper he dug. Candy, licorice, new gum in wrappers, old gum in Kleenex, a pen, a golf tee, coins, keys. He laid it all out in a plastic box and then the woman told him to turn around and go through again.
Again the alarm went off.
“What’s in your back pocket?” the woman commanded.
“Nothin’,” Nish whispered.
“There’s something there,” she snapped. “What is it?”
Nish slowly removed a long object from the back pocket of his droopy jeans.
“What’s this, then?” she snapped.
“Remote control,” Nish mumbled.
“A what?”
“Remote control,” Nish repeated. “For a TV.”
“You steal this from your hotel room, young man?”
Nish shook his head violently. “No.”
“Where did you get it? Shoplifting?”
The Complete Screech Owls, Volume 4 Page 28