Indian Horse

by Richard Wagamese

  30

  The Kapuskasing arena was new. The town had spent a lot of money on it and when we walked into the lobby the first thing we saw were glass cabinets along the walls filled with trophies and photographs. It was like a shrine to their home team. We stood there with our gear bags in our hands, studying the display. There were no awards in our bush league. The winners were celebrated with feasts and parties but there was no money for trophies. It was Virgil who finally broke off our reverie and led us to the dressing room.

  “Shiny things,” he said. “You guys are like a bunch of crows.”

  The dressing room was warm and well lit. Each player had a small cubicle and we all had room to sprawl out and stretch on the floor while we dressed. I could see the nerves working on the Moose. These were Indian boys. They may have been lumberjacks and mine workers when they weren’t playing the game, but concrete arenas and carpeted dressing rooms intimidated them. Fred Kelly hadn’t been able to make the trip. That unnerved them even more. Because of the Chiefs’ regular league schedule, the game could only be booked in mid-week and no one could pick up Fred’s shifts at the mine. We’d made the nearly three-hundred-mile trip in a strange, nervous quiet. Virgil did his best to assure the team that he had Fred’s game plan memorized, but my teammates were still anxious. None of them said a thing, and the quiet of our preparations was unnerving. We could hear the noisy crowd wending its way along the corridor and up into the seats. It sounded like a few thousand people. Their voices were shrill and excited. There was a knock at the door, and Virgil stumped over to answer it.

  “Need your lineup card,” someone said.

  “Our what?” Virgil asked.

  “Your lineup card. For the refs and the announcer.”

  “We don’t got one.”

  “You need one.”

  I took a few minutes to write our names and numbers on a card. When I handed it to the older man who stood waiting, the man looked at it and smiled. “You got some pretty weird names here,” he said. “Indian Horse. Black Wolf. Ear. You’re kidding, right?”

  Virgil just looked at him steadily.

  When we were ready, we stood up, waiting for someone to make the first move. “It’s just an exhibition game,” Virgil said. “It’s just another game so don’t make it bigger in your heads. Play it like you always do. Be Moose. Be Indians.”

  He led us to the ice. The building was like a great cavern. Flags and pennants hung from the rafters. The bright lights gave the ice the look of cotton. The red and blue lines were stark against it. The goalposts glared from each end and behind them the sparkling glass reached tall above the boards. The seats stretched back to form a shallow bowl around the rink, and the place was packed. As soon as we pushed out onto the ice the crowd began to shout at us. People laughed when they saw me, and I could hear them heckle as I skated around to loosen up.

  “Thirteen must be the mascot!”

  “No, no. That’s papoose. Thirteen’s their papoose!”

  “Hey, thirteen! You got a note from your mom to play?”

  The announcer cut in to introduce our lineup. We’d never heard our names over a loudspeaker before, and our guys raised their heads to listen. The crowd reacted whenever he read out a particularly Indian-sounding name, shouting out jibes and taunts. When the Chiefs skated out onto the ice, the people in the stands rose and erupted in foot stomping, hand clapping, whistles and cheers. The Chiefs circled in their end. They skated really well in their flashy uniforms and gear. We went through our warm-ups and gathered on our bench to prepare.

  “Just like we always do,” Virgil said. “If my dad was here, he’d be telling you the same thing. We just need to play our game. Our game. No matter what.”

  I was astonished at the skill and precision of the Chiefs. They were awesome to watch. I’d never seen a team that good play in person. Everybody knew exactly where the others were at all times, and passes that seemed aimed for open ice were gobbled up by their players streaking into it. They seemed programmed to aim for our net and they worked the puck effortlessly back and forth. They potted four goals against us in the first eight minutes. I hung back and watched them as I usually did. The score was five to nothing before I got that feeling of space behind my eyes, the clarity I was so familiar with. I signalled to Virgil, who was taking a breather near the gate to our bench, and he nodded.

  “Little Chief,” he yelled and pounded on the boards. On his next pass Stu Little Chief headed for the bench. When he was three feet away I hurtled over the boards and into the game.

  As soon as my skates hit the ice I knew exactly what to do. I burst down the right side and followed the puck deep into their end. Their defenseman scooped the puck off the boards and cut behind their net. The rest of them banked like fighter planes. That’s what I was counting on. I could see that the Chiefs’ first pass would be a hard flat one to their other defender halfway to the blue line. From there it was supposed to go across ice behind our retreating forwards, to their left-winger, who would tap it directly into open ice. Their centre would pick it up at full speed and head up ice. But they never got that chance. I was out of the defenseman’s range of vision, and when he sent out the first pass I cut in off the wing, where I coasted. I was blazing when the cross-ice pass was made and I snared it at their blue line. I heard the defenders yelp and they both jumped up to counter. I turned hard on the outside edge of my blades, pulled the puck around on my backhand and cut straight across in front of them. Fast. They had to come together, and when they did I cut the other way and swept into clear ice near the far faceoff circle. They couldn’t catch me. I straightened up fifteen feet in front of the net, dipped my shoulders, wriggled my hips and changed direction three times before lifting the puck over the sprawled goalie. Five to one.

  I barely went to the bench after that. The only rest I got was between periods, and by the time we came out for the final frame it was five to four for the Chiefs. By then they were keying on me, which opened up the ice for the rest of our guys. But they were a strong and disciplined team. Even when two of them took me out against the boards the other three skaters maintained control of their territory. My teammates played hard, but the experience of the Kapuskasing kept us at bay. They knew how to play puck control and they iced the puck at lot to force faceoffs. Time was wearing down. My energy began to flag. I signalled to Virgil with seven minutes left and took a seat on the bench. I squirted water over my head from a plastic bottle and wiped it off with a towel. The Chiefs and their crowd could smell victory, and the noise was tremendous. None of us had ever been in such a raucous atmosphere. When our players came to the bench I could see fear on their faces. The tension was huge. This loss would be enormous and I closed my eyes and breathed, drawing all my energy to a sharp point of focus. I felt lifted suddenly, borne upward and out of my tired body, and the air was suddenly clearer in my lungs. I waved a glove at a passing player and he whirled to the bench and I was back into the flow of the game. I stole the puck off a Chief player’s stick at their blue line and whirled and snapped a bullet of a pass right onto Virgil’s stick. The goalie slid across the crease with his pads stacked together. Virgil calmly lifted the puck over him. Tie game.

  Five minutes left, and I was flying now. Every time the Chiefs tried a rush I broke it up. Every time they worked to organize themselves I would rag the puck in a wild game of keep-away until their attack fizzled. The crowd shouted at them to hit me but I was too fast. I spun and danced and looped-the-loop like a daredevil. I skated like I had never skated before. I made seemingly impossible passes. I made moves that made the crowd roar. Then, with less than a minute remaining, I poke-checked the puck off a Chief defenseman’s stick. It squirted out into the open and I flashed past him and scooped it up with one hand on my stick. I pumped hard with the other and sped across centre ice. The crowd stood and yelled at their team to stop me. I raised my eyes to look ahead. Their g
oalie was backing slowly toward the net. The Moose were all yelling from our bench, and that’s when time slowed. I could hear the slice of my blades. I could hear my own breathing. I zoomed across the blue line but everything was all cottony and slow. The puck was pushed out ahead of me on the toe of the blade of my stick.

  My shoulders rolled as I sped in on goal. I could see the goalie squinting through the cage of his mask. When I was a dozen feet away I dropped one shoulder in a broad feint. He didn’t move. I faked a wrist shot. At the last second I turned my stick and pulled the puck back in, at the same time turning sharply so I faced back up ice. The goalie had moved across the net with me. I saw Stu Little Chief skating in all alone on the opposite side of the net and I hit him on the button with a hard pass. All he had to do was tap it into the empty side of the goal. I didn’t see the Chiefs defenseman coming. He hit me hard and I crashed into the boards. When I clambered to one knee the Moose piled on top of me. I was pummelled and punched in joy and by the time we got untangled the ice was littered with debris. The crowd was standing and cheering, and as I skated to our bench with thirty seconds left in the game they cheered even louder. The ice crew cleared up the mess and I sat on the bench as our guys controlled the puck after the faceoff. The players on the bench stood as the time clicked away and then erupted over the boards when the klaxon sounded. I was too tired to move.

  Finally, the Chiefs lined up to shake our hands and I made my way off the bench to join the ceremony. One by one they gripped my hand and nodded. The crowd kept up their applause. We skated to our bench and were headed towards the dressing room when someone stopped me at the exit and told me I was the game’s first star. I didn’t understand.

  “The first star,” Virgil said. “You know? Three stars like Hockey Night in Canada?”

  “I’m not going back out there.”

  “Have to. It’s tradition.”

  “I don’t know if I like that tradition,” I said.

  “Guess you better start to if you’re gonna play like that.”

  Then the announcer’s voice boomed out across the arena. “Introducing the game’s three stars. Your first star, from the Manitouwadge Moose, number thirteen, Saul Indian Horse. Indian Horse.”

  I expected boos to rain down. But when I coasted out to take a turn around centre ice, the applause and stamping feet sounded like thunder rolling around the arena. I looked up and everybody was standing and when I raised my stick in appreciation they cheered even louder. I skated to the bench and Virgil was grinning at me.

  “Better’n a fricking trophy any time, eh?” he said.

  “It’ll do,” I said and grinned. “Can we go home now?”

  31

  That game with the Kapuskasing Chiefs took us out of our shelter. Word got out about the Indian team that had beat the Senior A champions, and everyone wanted to play us. I wasn’t keen and Fred shared my apprehension, but Virgil and the others were determined to take up the challenge.

  “They think it’s their game,” I said. “I found that out at the school.”

  Virgil frowned. “They play the game for the same reason we do. For the feeling. Far as I know, no one owns that.”

  “They think they do.”

  “Yeah. Well. We’ll see.”

  Instead of our regular northern trips, we began travelling to towns dotted all along the Trans-Canada Highway, places we’d heard of or passed through but never had a reason to stop in before. There were teams everywhere, all of them eager to take on the upstart Indians from Manitouwadge. We lost some games and we won our share, but there was less joy in the trips. A motel in Timmins was less inviting than our regular billets in Batchewana. The air in those arenas didn’t move. You couldn’t feel the wind off the lake cutting across the blue line or follow a honking flock of geese across the sky. There were no Indian kids chasing after the pucks that got flipped over the boards into the snow; no brown fingers clutching the chicken wire behind the net. Zambonis replaced the gangs of people in gumboots and mackinaws hosing down the ice. Now the norm was rows of red seats, electronic scoreboards, junk food in Styrofoam boxes, and the jagged sound of English in the taunts and put-downs from the crowds.

  “This ice is crap,” I complained to Virgil. “On outdoor ice you really gotta know how to skate.”

  “It’s arena ice,” he said. “Same everywhere.”

  “That’s what I mean. The ice in Heron Bay was rough where the wind cut through the black spruce and made ripples and ridges. It was uneven in Ginoogaming because the ground slanted up from one end. We had to know that. Had to use it in our game.”

  “This makes it easier.”

  “Easier ain’t better. It’s just easier.”

  We played almost every week in another town. The games were always events, mostly because people were curious to see if Indians could really skate, if we could play the game right. Although I didn’t want to be there, I took it as my personal responsibility to show them. The white players tried to rough me up but I used my speed to leave them behind me. They speared me, elbowed me, slashed me, head-butted me, but I always found the open ice I needed to make another play, to create magic out of mayhem. The rest of the Moose fought for me. I could shrug off a cheap hit in favour of a better opportunity, but my teammates resented the way I was treated. They resented the cold, inhospitable way we were all treated. For them, the game had always been gentlemanly; rough and hard for certain, but clean, and the reserve teams and the communities that spawned them had been like family. Now there were out-and-out brawls. Once, when I got laid out after a crushing hit from behind, they streamed off our bench and the fight that ensued was horrific. It took the referees a full twenty minutes to get things calmed down. Once the penalties were sorted out, both teams were left with four forwards, a pair of defensemen and a goalie. The crowd was rabid. Garbage rained down on us. A group of them pissed and shat in our dressing room. The tires were slashed on the vans. No one spoke after that game, which we lost by two goals. My teammates carried that resentment with them, and the games we played after were tougher and harder, more bitterly fought, and once, in Hearst, when things again got out of control and blood spewed in an epic team fight in the third period, they refused to line up for the handshakes at the end of the game. They grew vengeful and no cheap shot went unpaid with fists. It saddened me. The Moose went from jubilant boys to hard, taciturn men in no time at all. But as long as we kept winning our share, none of them ventured a suggestion that we return to the way it had been.

  It drove me to even deeper focus. I worked deliberately at getting that keen sense of vision to alight on me faster. I wanted to spare my team the indignity of a brawl. I wanted to keep the spirit of the game instilled in them and let them play with the freedom and abandon they once had. So I worked hard at learning to connect to that vision. It started to take me less and less time to read those teams. The players had all grown up the same way, with the same kind of coaching, the same perceptions of the game. Their ideas of flow and movement were restricted by the predictable nature of their coaching, and they seldom took the risk of breaking out of the standard mode of play. I saw that and took advantage of it. Soon we’d left the bush circuit behind altogether and we were invited to play in big-money tournaments everywhere. We earned enough our first winter out to buy new uniforms. Everyone was excited.

  Then we ran into the black heart of northern Ontario in the 1960s and we were hated. Hated. There’s no other word for it. The Moose came out of the bush as a team that wanted to prove itself against the best competition around. We arrived in those towns as hockey players expecting to play a square game, stick to stick, end to end, fair and equal. But they only ever saw us as Indians. They only ever saw brown faces where white ones should have been. We were an unwelcome entity in their midst. And when we won it only made things worse.

  Chapleau was a mill town east of Wawa, and the tournament
there drew teams from as far away as Timmins and Sudbury. A lot of pride was on the line. The games were scrappy and tough and it took everything we had to wrest the championship game from the Sault Ste. Marie team. But we did it. It was a long drive back to Manitouwadge and the boys all had to work the next day, so we decided to spend some of our winnings on a meal in Devon, a small town outside of Chapleau. There wasn’t much to the place, but the café in a hotel looked okay. When we walked through the door, we could see another door that led to a bar. Whenever the door swung open, we could hear the sound of a jukebox and the laughter of men. We were the only ones in the café. We took four tables by the window overlooking the street. The waitress took our orders and we were recounting the game highlights and laughing when a man entered. He took a long look at us before retreating into the bar. None of us gave it a thought.

  Then the music from the jukebox stopped.

  I looked up to see a line of men entering the café from the bar. They were working men, big and strong-looking with stern faces. Several of them sat on stools and spun around on them to face us. The rest stood around our tables. There were eight of them.

  “You boys got kinda big for the britches,” a swarthy, tall man said and leaned one hand on the table where Virgil and I sat.

  “No idea what you mean,” Virgil said. He kept his face neutral.

  “Well, you win a little hockey tournament and then you think you got the right to come in here and eat like white people,” the man said.

  “We’re only here to eat. We didn’t set out to copy anybody,” Virgil said.

  “Don’t get cute with me boy.”

  Virgil pushed his chair back and stood up. “Boy?” he asked. “How big do they grow men where you come from?”

  The man sneered. “Plenty bigger’n you.”