The Last of the Lumbermen

by Brian Fawcett

  It takes us a while to sort out the story. D.O.A., in case you’re not familiar with the term, means Dead On Arrival, but this particular D.O.A. is the name of a hardcore band famous enough that even I’ve heard of them. Seems they sponsor a team in the Vancouver Rec Leagues. A couple of the D.O.A. band members occasionally play on the team, too, although it isn’t clear if they’re here now.

  Jack has already told them they can’t play in the tournament, and they’re being amazingly amiable about it. As far as they’re concerned the whole trip is a lark, and they’re prepared to watch a few games, hang out in the several bars that feature bands, play a few guest sets, and bite the heads off a few hundred weasels.

  The only difficulty Jack’s having is that Wendel has lost his mind over them. He’s a D.O.A. fan, and he’s acting like a nineyear-old at his first rock concert, wanting Jack to kick the Saints out of the tournament so the Murder Squad can play. Jack isn’t having any of it, naturally, but he does pick up on Wendel’s enthusiasm enough to friendly up with them, suggesting a couple of hotels the musicians might want to stay in (and wreck). He also offers them free passes for the games. “They should,” he whispers to me, “liven things up.”

  I have to collar Wendel and drag him inside the Coliseum when it’s time to prepare for the game.

  THIRTY-THREE

  IT’S A FEW MINUTES before seven PM when I step onto the ice for the warm-up to the tournament’s first game, us against the Idaho Saints. The Coliseum is nearly full, and, for a few minutes, rumbling with confusion: where are the Mohawks? Once the crowd realizes that it’s us in the green uniforms the rumble changes to cheers, and when the cheers build it’s clear they like us, and maybe the uniforms and the name change even more.

  When the game starts at seven on the dot, Jack sends me out to take the opening face-off. I’m not about to get a swelled head over this even though my father and stepmother are at the game, standing behind our bench with Esther and cheering louder than anyone. The honour is ceremonial, because I’m no longer on the team’s first line. Over the weeks I’ve been out, first line honours have evolved to Artie, Gord, and Freddy, with Wendel doubleshifting the second and third lines, playing with whoever Jack throws out with him. Wendel will get his share of goals even if his linemates are a pair of fence posts.

  In this game I’ll draw third line work centering Wendel and hope I’ll be more use to him than a fence post. But mostly I’m going to sit. I haven’t played full contact in nearly two months — not that the Saints look interested in contact — and I don’t have a clue what I’ve got. It might be nothing.

  If I don’t have anything, a game like this is the best I could ask for. When I watched the Saints come off their bus I suspected they wouldn’t be able to beat us even if we were playing with broomsticks and wearing gumboots, and when Wendel scores while I’m trying to get off the ice my suspicion is confirmed. I’ve even got an assist to prove it. By the end of the first period the score is eight-nothing, and we haven’t even been trying.

  The crowd loves it, and none of us are exactly suicidal about playing a laugher. Except Gus. He takes the incompetence of his American compatriots personally. Just over ten minutes in, he scores a goal by flipping the puck high in the air, retrieving it himself inside the Saints blueline, and plunking it behind their goalie — but he doesn’t celebrate. Instead, he skates past the Saints’ bench and stops to jaw at their coach. I lean over the boards to catch what he’s saying. The Saints’ coach, it seems, had his players going door to door all day trying to convert the local heathens, and Gus is chewing him out for it.

  “These sorry fucking specimens of yours are supposed to play hockey,” he says loud enough for our bench to hear. “And you’ve had them out all day trying to bust these fine heathen folk around here with your silly Oral Roberts crap about sin and damnation. You think anyone around here cares about damnation? We’re all fucking damned. Why else would we be living here?”

  The coach doesn’t have an answer, so Gus goes on to explain, in graphic detail, what’s going to happen to his team if they keep playing hockey in the missionary position. To hear Gus talk, you’d have thought he was born in Mantua.

  Larry Godin is refereeing, and he lets Gus blather on a while before threatening him with a delay-of-game penalty. Gus won’t listen. He goes into another rant about arrogant Americans screw- ing Canada out of its birthright, which Godin decides is too far off the topic. Up goes Godin’s arm, and when Gus still won’t give it up, he lays a misconduct on him. Gus storms off to the dress- ing room to chill out, and I can hear him cursing all the way. After he’s gone, though, the Saints take a little more interest in hockey, and we don’t score on them for nearly five minutes.

  During the intermission Jack gives us a little inspirational speech of his own — aimed mostly at Gus, who’s still mumbling about missionaries and other disgraces to the US Constitution. Jack is being more practical. He just tells us he doesn’t want us getting chicken blood on our new uniforms, and although he can’t quite bring himself to say it out loud, he makes it clear he doesn’t want any cruelty.

  “This is going to be a long tournament, and not all of us are as young as we used to be,” he concludes, tapping his cast and pointing at Gus, Gord, and me. “There’s more than one team in this tournament capable of cleaning our clocks, so let’s save the tough stuff for when it’s needed.”

  His point is made, sort of, and we coast through the second and third periods as if it’s a practice. For me it’s exactly what I need. I play three or four shifts each period, just enough to test my timing and my sternum. Four assists tell me that my timing is at least in synch with Wendel’s, and when, early in the third period, I have to dive over a Saint defenceman when he trips over his own skates, I hit the boards hard enough to give me the health clearance I want.

  The “sort of” is Gus, who’s still annoyed. He doesn’t lecture the Saints again, but early in the third he can’t keep himself from slamming one of their defencemen against the boards from behind. It’s the only serious hit in the entire game, and it’s so flagrant Godin tosses him.

  The final score is fourteen to one, and it’s over by nine-thirty. We rag the puck through most of the third period, and it would have been easy to shut them out. But as the third period begins I hear Jack lean over and tell Bobby Bell to let them score one so Junior’s head will still fit inside his mask when the serious games start. Bobby isn’t too subtle about it, either. He picks up the puck in the corner during one of the few times the Saints manage to get it inside our zone, sees one of them standing about ten feet in front of Junior, and lays it right on his stick. The kid looks surprised, but he knows what to do.

  WENDEL, JAMES, AND I join the rest of the family in the stands to watch the Bears play Chilliwack. Well, I watch, anyway. Esther and Claire are swishing back and forth in the shorthand they’ve developed, alternately discussing dinner on Sunday — now a weekly event — and talking about the pair of breeding New- foundlands that’re coming in a couple of weeks. Wendel, who is trying hard to hide how eager he is to get to the bar where several members of the Murder Squad are playing sets, is chatting up my father about some complication in the non-profit society they incorporated last week to enable the community scaling yard. They’re pretty much birds of a feather, at least when it comes to politics and trees, which they agree are one and the same. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. Wendel had to inherit that super-serious side from somewhere, and he didn’t get it from me or his mother. I can’t get a word in edgewise with either conversation.

  At least I have James to watch the game with — or I do until Gord stops by. He just happens to have the autopsy results on the bear, and I lose James to that in two seconds. I listen distract- edly as Gord relates the details, which aren’t pleasant. The animal’s tissue was so riddled with PCBS it should have been glowing in the dark. Someone — chances are we’ll never know who — unloaded enough t
ransformer oil in that equipment dump to contaminate it for a couple of hundred years.

  I lean over to interrupt. “Fabulous. That means Mantua’s now got it’s very own Love Canal.”

  Gord doesn’t blink. “Depends on how far into the water table the PCBS have penetrated,” he says. “They’ll be running tests out there most of next summer.”

  I tune them out, all of them, and try to watch the game, which is very good hockey but not much of a contest. The Bears, to a man, play as hard as I’ve seen in a couple of years, but they’re outclassed and outgunned. The Lions are younger, faster, and better skilled.

  During the intermission Wendel takes off for the bar, and Gord leaves with Jack to catch some sleep. They’re going to need whatever sleep they can get, since they’re more or less running the tournament.

  James and I watch the second period with my father, whose new interest in hockey is more family loyalty than passion for the game, while Esther and Claire stroll around the Coliseum concourse arm-in-arm, talking up a storm. It’s a curious organism, this family that’s settled around me.

  The easiest relationship to settle was the one with James, which is the one I would have predicted would be the hardest. But ever since I’ve gotten the taste for dealing the cards off the top of the deck whenever I see they’re not marked, things like this are easier. With him, I simply told the truth.

  About a week after the mauling, I sat him down and told him I didn’t know I’d had a brother, and that I thought my father was dead. I left a few hesitations and blank spaces in the explanation for what I don’t know, and for a couple of discretions he doesn’t need to trouble himself with. He didn’t need to live with what I thought I did all those years ago, or with what his father did fifteen years before he was born, so I skipped the part about the bus accident, and I didn’t say I spent twenty-five years think- ing my father was wandering around drunk or living in a detox. Being a kid with no discretion at all, he asked about my mother, and why she and Dad broke up, and I answered that I really wasn’t sure except that they didn’t get along. Like I said, there are some secrets that don’t need to be revealed. My mother’s grievances against his father aren’t his responsibility.

  He took it pretty well. He’d had a few days to think things over, and I got the impression he’d already forgiven me short and long: short for walking into the bear and getting myself treed, and long for, well, existing.

  For sure, he took it differently than Wendel did when Esther finally told him I was his genetic father. Wendel exploded with laughter, yelled “Give me a break,” and stomped out of the house. We didn’t see him for three days, and when he arrived for dinner unannounced on the fourth day he didn’t say a word about it. Still hasn’t, either.

  ESTHER AND I LEAVE after the second period, with the score five to one. I hear later that it ends that way, but if the puck hadn’t been acting like it was playing for the Bears all night, the score might have been eighteen to one.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  THE OTHER GAMES IN the first draw go roughly as expected, too. The Raiders thump Creston twelve to three. In the late games the Fort St. John team mows down the Terrace Flyers six-one, and, in the dead of the night, Hinton gets by Grande Prairie five to four and the Roosters put the boots to the poor Burns Lake team thirteen to four.

  Despite the first-night partying, everybody makes it to our game against Hinton none too worse for wear except Stan Lagace, who Gord had to roust along with the Burns Lake Cow- boys when he drove over to their motel at seven AM to make sure they’d show for their game. He found Stan passed out in the front seat of his car outside the Cowboy units. One of his cousins, it seems, is the Cowboys’ goalie, and the two of them made a night of it.

  Wendel and Freddy must have had a particularly good time at the bar, because all through the warm-up they’ve got a bad case of the giggles.

  The Hinton Locomotives aren’t the Idaho Saints, and we come off the ice after the first period tied at one, and sucking air because their defencemen are lining up along the blueline and thumping us when we try to carry the puck in. They aren’t much on offence — the goal they get is a looping fifty-footer that Junior boots — but they play decent hockey. I take a regular shift.

  In the dressing room Jack tells us to dump-and-chase for the second to loosen up the blueline barricade. It works, and the score is five-one after another twenty minutes. I pick up two of the goals, without anyone laying a finger on me. Both times Wendel dumps the puck in, turns on the jets, and has it behind their net before they know what’s hit them. He puts the puck on my stick as I’m arriving in the high slot, and I hit the upper right corner, stickside, both times. Speed isn’t everything.

  We’ve already heard that the Lions have taken the Raiders, but during the second-period intermission we get a surprising score from the other arena. It isn’t that Creston has beaten the Cowboys in the eight AM game. It’s that, early in the second period of the Okenoke/Saints game, the Saints are ahead threeone. It doesn’t make any sense to me, but for some reason Wendel and Freddy think it’s hilarious. And somehow, they don’t seem to surprised.

  “What the hell is going on up there?” I ask Wendel.

  The question sends both of them into hysterics. “Don’t ask,” Wendel answers once he gets control of himself. “Really. You don’t want to know.”

  When Jack tells me he wants me to cool my heels so I’ll have something for the next game, I spend most of the period wondering what it is and why Wendel thinks it’s so funny. Either the Bears found Jesus or they all decided to play the game with one arm tied behind their backs.

  We cruise through the third, not taking chances and letting Junior get some business. Gus is the only one who won’t let up, buzzing around the ice like a Tasmanian devil, getting successive penalties for boarding, slashing, and roughing.

  Halfway through the period the Hinton captain, a big, amiable centre I played against years ago after he’d washed out of Junior A, skates by our bench and stops to chat.

  “Hey, Weaver,” he says, not very seriously. “Put a leash on your pit bull before I have to whack him over the head with something.”

  “We don’t control him,” I answer. “He’s on remote from a ship in outer space.”

  “Well, bench the sucker, then.”

  “We don’t want him on the bench when he gets like this,” Bobby Bell says. “He chews on things.”

  The Hinton captain skates away, laughing. Nice guy, but just after the next face-off he decks Gus with a hip check in the neutral zone, and Gus hobbles off the ice cursing.

  “Someone get that sonofabitch,” he demands, slumping down on the bench beside me and rubbing his knee. “That was a deliberate attempt to injure.”

  Jack steps in behind him and pats him on the shoulder. “It was an attempt to educate,” he says. “If he’d been trying to hurt you, you’d be lying face down on the ice right now.”

  Gus turns to complain more, sees that it isn’t going to work, and relaxes. “Is this great hockey or what?” he asks no one in particular. “I love this game.”

  I give him a nudge. “Are you sure you’re really a psychiatrist?”

  He gives me a look that half-convinces me he’s been giving himself electroshock treatments. He answers in his best Bronx accent. “I’m from New Yawk City. We’re all escapees from the loony bin.”

  “Just like around here, then.”

  He shrugs. I’m not sure whether or not he’s kidding.

  WE WIN GUS’S GREAT hockey game six to three, which is no surprise. The surprise, ten minutes after the game ends, is when Wendel gets off the phone and tells us that the Idaho Saints have defeated Okenoke by the same score.

  “Okay,” I ask Wendel. “You want to tell me what you know about all this?”

  “Know?” he answers, trying to appear puzzled, but losing it mid sentence. “What is it exactly that I’m s
upposed to know?”

  “Well, what you two are finding so funny about the Bears losing to those goofy missionaries.”

  “Geez,” he says. “You got us all wrong, here. Did somebody pass a regulation about not looking happy when we win?”

  “No, but you didn’t start the heavy chortling until you heard the other score. Don’t give me the gears.”

  He motions me over to a corner where one of the visiting teams has stashed their equipment and plunks himself down on top of an equipment bag. “The Saints,” he says, “uh, didn’t make it to their game.”

  This makes sense. “Someone did. Who?”

  “The Murder Squad,” he answers.

  I don’t really want to know how this was engineered because I’m pretty sure Wendel was riding in the locomotive. I need to know just one thing.

  “You want to tell me what became of our missionary brethren?”

  “They’re up at Ward’s Lake, I think. In the community hall.” Ward’s Lake is a small fishing resort about sixty kilometres north of town.

  “You think that’s where they are? Where’s their bus?”

  “Oh,” he says, “Their bus is at the other arena. Where it’s supposed to be. The missionaries were, er, transported out to Ward’s Lake and left in the hall. To hold prayer meetings. They were supplied with refreshments, and stuff.”

  Oh, oh. “Refreshments” is local code for grain alcohol, which, if you’re not expecting it, can be successfully mixed with anything: Coke, ginger ale, lemonade, probably even hot chocolate. It’s used around these parts for wedding stags or other occasions where you need someone drunk enough that you can paint them up and chain them to parking meters, truck bumpers, the front doors of City Hall, and any other location that’ll make them look silly when they wake up.