The Boston Breakout

by Roy MacGregor

  Text copyright © 2014 by Roy MacGregor

  Published in Canada by Tundra Books, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, One Toronto Street, Suite 300, Toronto, Ontario M5C 2V6

  Published in the United States by Tundra Books of Northern New York, P.O. Box 1030, Plattsburgh, New York 12901

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2013953675

  All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the publisher – or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency – is an infringement of the copyright law.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  MacGregor, Roy, 1948-, author

  The Boston breakout / by Roy MacGregor.

  (Screech Owls)

  ISBN 978-1-77049-421-3 (pbk.).–ISBN 978-1-77049-426-8 (epub)

  I. Title. II. Series.

  PS8575.G84B67 2014 jC813′.54 C2013-906915-1

  C2013-906916-X

  Designed by Jennifer Lum

  www.tundrabooks.com

  v3.1

  For Hawkley Robert Roy Dzilums, who will one day choose his own team to cheer on …

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  About the Author

  1

  Yo! Mom!

  Wish you were here (actually, I don’t – having way too much fun!). This is a postcard (Coach’s idea, not mine). The picture on the front is a statue of Ben Franklin. It’s outside the school he quit when he was 1o years old! Soon as I get home, Mom, you and me are going down to Tamarack Public School and I’m handing in my resignation. I’m done with school. And I mean it! Will explain when I return.

  Your loving son and the Screech Owls’ all-time greatest defenseman,

  Nish

  Wayne Nishikawa licked the stamp and slapped it on the postcard. He stopped to read it to Travis just seconds before he dropped the card into the U.S. Mail box in the hotel lobby. Travis had no time to prevent it from happening. And he couldn’t reach down into the box and pull the postcard back – that would be mail theft, a major crime in the United States of America. Travis Lindsay, captain of the Screech Owls peewee hockey team from the little Canadian town of Tamarack, was nothing if not honest.

  Travis let his sometimes-best-friend-sometimes-worst-enemy have it. “You idiot!” he yelled at Nish. “You’re just going to upset your poor mother. Besides, you can’t quit school just like that!”

  “Why not? Ben Franklin did. He didn’t need school. I don’t need school. Guys like us are too smart for school. School is for dummies.”

  “Dummies like me, you mean?”

  “You said it, not me.”

  There were tournaments where all you could remember was the hockey. And there were tournaments where the hockey took a backseat. This trip to Boston, Travis had decided, would be one where the hockey played a secondary role.

  First, it was summertime. The coach of the Screech Owls, Muck Munro, hated summer hockey. He had long forbidden the Owls to play in any of the weekend tournaments held during July and August. Summer, Muck argued, was for building up your passion for hockey, and you did that by doing something else completely. He wanted the Owls to play other games – lacrosse, for example, or baseball – and to do other things, like swim and camp and take canoe trips. He said this would make them all the more keen for hockey when it started up again in the fall. Travis was pretty sure Muck was right. Besides, Travis loved lacrosse almost as much as hockey and was glad for a summer switch in sports.

  So, heading off to a hockey tournament in July was very unusual for the Screech Owls.

  Travis knew why they were going. It was because of Muck himself. Not because of Muck’s great love of hockey, but because of his passion for history. The coach was always reading history books on their trips. He talked about history whenever he thought they should know more about a place than just where the dressing rooms were. He’d taken them to the Alamo in Texas, to the field outside Pittsburgh where United Airlines Flight 93 had gone down during the terrorist attacks of 9/11, to the ice surface in Lake Placid where “The Miracle on Ice” had taken place years before any of the Owls had even been born. Muck liked hockey trips to have a point beyond plain hockey.

  When the invitation arrived for the Owls to come to the Paul Revere Peewee Invitational Hockey Tournament, Muck put it to a vote among the Owls’ parents and it was unanimous that the team would go. School might be out, but Muck said they’d treat it like a school field trip as much as a hockey tournament. Boston, after all, was where the American Revolution was launched, where Ben Franklin was born, where Paul Revere set out on his horse to warn his countrymen that “The British are coming! The British are coming!”

  And Boston was beautiful, a city of world-famous universities, sculls rowing on the Charles River, the Boston Common park, the world-famous New England Aquarium – not to mention the city where the greatest hockey defenseman in history had played – Bobby Orr: number 4.

  “I wear number 44,” Nish told his teammates, “so I must be ten times as good.”

  Larry Ulmar, whom everyone called Data, sighed. “That would be eleven times as good, Einstein.”

  Nish snapped back, “Ten, eleven – what’s the difference?”

  “The difference,” said Sarah Cuthbertson, the team’s star center, “is that he is Bobby Orr and you are Wayne Nishikawa. That’s roughly the difference between night and day.”

  Nish shot Sarah a raspberry – his usual response to being one-upped.

  The trip had come together easily. The kids were all off school. Those involved with lacrosse, baseball, football, swimming lessons or camp were all given permission to miss the week. Only a few of the parents would be coming along, but they were traveling on their own. For the Owls themselves, Mr. Dillinger, the team’s beloved manager, had the old team bus – a secondhand school bus – up and running as good as ever.

  With Mr. D at the wheel and Muck lost in a huge book about the Boston Tea Party, the Owls had come over the Thousand Islands Bridge near Kingston on a gorgeous bright morning and headed across Upstate New York. They took the ferry across Lake Champlain, Nish screaming all the way that the tiny waves were making him seasick. Over and over, he yelled, “I’M GONNA HURL!”

  Across Vermont, down through New Hampshire, and on into Massachusetts the old bus rumbled. They stopped for pee breaks and for one Stupid Stop, which meant Mr. D handed out small American bills to the players, with instructions to “Buy something completely silly and totally useless.” Nish used his money to buy a little plastic disc launcher and spent the rest of the trip annoying everyone on the bus by shooting tiny flying saucers at them while they were sleeping.

  They checked into their hotel – the Marriott Long Wharf, right next to the New England Aquarium – and Muck and Mr. D gave them a half hour to “freshen up” before meeting down in the lobby for something “very special
.”

  Nish’s idea of freshening up differed from that of Travis and their two roommates: Lars Johanssen, the little Swedish-born defenseman, and Wilson Kelly, also a defenseman. Wilson had been born in Regina, Saskatchewan, but maintained he would one day play hockey in the Olympics for Team Jamaica, if Jamaica ever got a hockey team, because both his parents had come from there. Wilson and Lars carefully emptied out their suitcases, just as Travis had done, and began dividing up the drawers in the dresser so they wouldn’t be getting things like socks and underwear mixed up. They were almost done when Nish walked into the room, zipped open his suitcase, turned it upside down so the contents landed on the floor, then tossed the empty case in a corner. He plopped down on a bed, reached for the remote, and immediately began surfing channels in the hope that Muck and Mr. D hadn’t asked the front desk to block the adult movie channel. Muck and Mr. D had, however; they knew Nish too well.

  A half hour later, all the Owls – Travis, Nish, Lars, Wilson, Data, Sarah, Dmitri Yakushev, Samantha Bennett, Simon Milliken, Derek Dillinger, Jeremy Weathers, Jenny Staples, Jesse Highboy, Andy Higgins, Gordie Griffith, and Fahd Noorizadeh – gathered in the lobby of the hotel. Muck and Mr. D were waiting for them with an announcement.

  “We’re going to walk the Freedom Trail,” Muck said.

  “Can’t we drive it?” Nish whined.

  Muck ignored the comment and continued. “You’re going to see where the United States was born. Mr. D here has arranged for a guide, and we’re all going to spend the afternoon seeing some of the most historical sites in Boston. So let’s head out. It’s a long walk on a hot day.”

  “Don’t they have a video version?” Nish asked.

  Muck said nothing. He didn’t need to. His stare froze Nish on the spot.

  2

  The tour guide was wonderful. Dressed in period costume – blue waistcoat, wide-brimmed hat, long stockings, leather shoes with gleaming French buckles, a powder bag slung over his right shoulder – he was full of fascinating tales. They set out across the gorgeous green Boston Common toward the Massachusetts State House. All along the walk, he told them how this was where the colonists in America first rose up against British rule and British taxes and where American independence was born.

  He took them to the Granary Burying Ground nearby and showed them the graves of Paul Revere, Samuel Adams (“I thought he was a beer,” Nish hissed behind Travis’s ear), and John Hancock, whose flowery signature was on the Declaration of Independence.

  Travis blushed to recall his own efforts to create a fancy signature. At the back of the little scrapbook he kept for newspaper stories about the Owls that he clipped from the Tamarack Weekly he had reserved several pages for practicing autographs. He must have tried forty or fifty different styles before he settled on one that included a long loop in the Y, the last letter of his name, and tucked inside the loop was a carefully drawn 7 – his number, and the number once worn by his father’s distant cousin, “Terrible” Ted Lindsay, when Ted Lindsay was a star with Gordie Howe and the Detroit Red Wings.

  The Owls took pictures of the various graves and monuments. Wilson asked Travis to take a photo of him standing beside a tiny little gravestone off to the side of the huge monument to John Hancock. The simple marker said “Frank – Servant to John Hancock.” The guide had explained that Frank was a slave who was owned by the Hancock family. Frank was so beloved by the Hancocks that they got special permission to bury him here, beside his master, rather than in the burial ground designated for slaves.

  “They didn’t even give him a last name,” said Wilson, his eyes tearing up for someone he’d never known. “Just Frank. Like he was the family dog or something.”

  Travis said nothing. He took the photo for Wilson and handed the camera back. What could he say? The world was sometimes such a mystifying place.

  The group moved down a side street to Boston Latin School, which the guide said was “the first public school in the United States. It dates from 1635. It was a school nearly four hundred years ago – and it remains a school today.”

  The guide named a long list of people who had gone to the school, most of them unfamiliar to Travis. Presidents of Harvard University had gone here. Several state governors had gone to school here. And Ben Franklin had once been a student here.

  “Benjamin Franklin,” the guide said, “may have been the smartest American ever. He was a great writer and a newspaper editor and publisher. He was an accomplished musician. He signed the Declaration of Independence. He served as United States ambassador to France. He was a chess master and spoke fluent French and Italian as well as English. He studied electricity. He invented the lightning rod and bifocal glasses. He was an absolute genius, no doubt, but there is something even more unusual about Ben Franklin. It has to do with his statue standing here at this very school. Can anyone tell me what it is?”

  The Owls mumbled among themselves and guessed. Fahd thought Franklin had “invented” electricity and several of the players agreed, but the guide said no, he didn’t invent electricity, but it was true that Ben Franklin flew a kite in a lightning storm to study the behavior of electricity. Sam thought maybe he had invented the camera, but the guide shook his head and smiled.

  “No,” he said. “It’s got something to do with this school.”

  Muck could hold his answer in no longer. “He dropped out.”

  The guide raised an eyebrow in appreciation. “You knew!” he said to Muck, who appeared to blush. “You’re right!

  “Benjamin Franklin, the smartest man in America, despised school,” the guide said to the delighted Owls. “His family was poor. His father was a candle-maker.”

  “What did his mother do?” Sarah asked.

  The guide laughed. “She survived. Mrs. Franklin had seventeen children. Little Ben was her fifteenth. But the family recognized that he was brilliant beyond his years, and somehow they got the money together to enroll him here. It was then called the South Grammar School. But he hated it.”

  “How old was he when he quit?” Fahd asked.

  “Ten,” the guide said. “When he was ten years old, he dropped out and never again attended a single day of school.”

  “I’m twelve,” Nish said. “That means I’ve already wasted two years of my life.”

  The guide laughed and moved on. Nearby was a life-size statue of a donkey, symbol of the Democratic Party.

  Nish climbed onto its back and asked Fahd to take his picture.

  “Perfect,” Sam pronounced. “A total ass sitting on an ass.”

  But the idea had lodged in Nish’s brain. They spent the rest of the afternoon visiting the various sites along the Freedom Trail: Faneuil Hall, Paul Revere’s house, the Bunker Hill monument, and, all the way out along the harbor, the USS Constitution, the famous three-masted warship that had won so many battles during the War of 1812.

  The Owls had never seen Muck so happy. After the tour, their coach took them to a nearby souvenir store and told them all to pick out postcards and he would pay for them.

  The Owls all thought the cards were just for themselves, small souvenirs of the afternoon, but Muck had other ideas.

  “We’re going back to the hotel, and you are all going to send your card home with a message for the parents who couldn’t come on the trip. I want them to know you’re not just wasting your time and their money while you’re here in Boston. We want them to know you might be learning something as well.”

  Some of the Owls groaned. They didn’t want to write postcards. They wanted to try the hotel pool.

  “No one sends postcards,” Nish said. “Why can’t we just text them to let them know we’re okay?”

  Muck sent a withering stare at the mouthy defenseman.

  An hour later, Nish had his postcard written, addressed, and stamped. And before Travis could stop it, the message was in the mail and on its way to poor, suffering Mrs. Nishikawa, who was about to find out that her only son had decided to quit school.

  3


  The Owls’ first game was scheduled for the Boston Bruins’ practice arena in nearby Wilmington. Mr. D pulled up the old team bus outside the suburban rink. The bus burped and backfired in a cloud of black exhaust as the engine died. Mr. D grasped his nose and made a face as if the old bus had just passed wind.

  Travis caught his own reflection in the side mirror that the driver used for backing up. His first thought was that he had never seen himself reflected there before. Could he be getting taller? Finally?

  Travis’s mother had told him he worried unnecessarily about his size. “Lindsay men are late bloomers,” she said. “You’ll grow taller than your father, just you wait and see.”

  Travis hoped so. His father was tall, taller than most of the other fathers of his teammates, but why did he have to “wait and see”? Why couldn’t he grow now, so he could stop worrying about it?

  He could see he was changing. His face was a little longer. His hair was close-cut now, and thanks to the summer sun it was more blond than it was in hockey season. Travis looked around at his teammates to see if they, too, were changing. Sarah’s hair was like gold. It even seemed to sparkle. Travis couldn’t tell if she looked different. Sam’s hair was as red as ever. Jesse Highboy was maybe broader at the shoulders. Little Simon Milliken was finally catching up to the rest. Only Nish seemed not to have changed one bit: still wider than any of the others, still slopping stuff into his hair so he could style it high like his idol, Elvis Presley. Still with a face that couldn’t hide an emotion even if you pulled a brown paper bag over it. That face – beet red during games, redder yet when embarrassed, twisting and churning with whatever mad plan or crazy thought was passing through it – was pure Nish. His signature. No flowery loop or number 44 required.

  The Owls were thrilled to think that the Boston Bruins, Stanley Cup champions, had sat in the very stalls they would be sitting in. They would be skating on the same ice as Bruins captain Zdeno Chara, hockey’s tallest player at six foot nine. And if they went all the way to the final of the Paul Revere tournament, they would play for the championship in the Boston TD Garden itself, the rink where all the great stars of the NHL – Sidney Crosby, Steven Stamkos, Taylor Hall, Alexander Ovechkin, and dozens of others – had played. It was not the old Boston Garden, where Bobby Orr had practically reinvented the way defense was played in hockey, but it was close. It was a true NHL hockey rink, and that was what mattered most.