I put the puck on my left skate, reach back, and yank the defenceman’s stick out of his grip. Then, before he can wrap his arms around me, I flip the puck to Wendel with my forehand. In one move he puts it in the short side, and we’re ahead two to one.
The Lions start running around in their own zone, and we pour it on. With five minutes left we’re up four-one. Gord scores both goals without touching the puck with his stick. Artie, I swear, deliberately banks both shots off his behind.
“Christ,” I say to Gord when there’s just a couple of minutes left and Jack sends out the third line, “we’re about to win a hockey tournament for this crummy town.”
He gives me his best meathead grin. “Yeah. Life can really surprise a guy sometimes, can’t it?”
Maybe it’s because I may never play a serious game of hockey again in my life, but I want back onto the ice. I want to be out there when it ends.
Jack sees the two of us talking, and, for the last minute, puts us on the ice together with Wendel on the right side. We get ourselves crossed up and the Lions score a second goal, but that doesn’t matter.
Nor does it matter that I lose my last face-off. Wendel picks up the puck behind our net, flies down the ice without anyone touching him, and gets the goal back. I don’t make it as far as centre ice before he puts it in the net, but that doesn’t matter either. I’m cruising, watching my son, watching the sun set.
THE FINAL BUZZER SOUNDS, and it’s over. Mantua has won its own tournament for the first time, and I’m going to have my photograph in the lobby a third time — even if it’s only for a couple of years until the new arena is built, and the Memorial Coliseum is torn down, and the photographs land up in somebody’s basement, and what we did continues to exist only in the diminishing republic of human memory. Screw all that. This moment belongs to us, and we skate around the ice like we’ve won the Stanley Cup.
Is it bittersweet? Not at all. Jack set up the referees to select the tournament all-stars, but he hasn’t thought to get anyone to present the tournament trophy. He wasn’t about to let that shit-head Snell take the honour — or more likely, being an habitual pessimist, he thought he’d be presenting it to someone else. While Larry Godin calls the tournament all-stars down — most of them are already on the ice — Jack spots Greg Friesen, the manager of the television station, and scrambles over to talk him into making the presentation. It’s an out-of-measure payment for the lousy coverage his station gave us, but at least he’s wearing a suit and can speak an English sentence or two without garbling it.
The refs have selected Wendel, Artie, and a big right winger from the Raiders to the first team, together with a slick youngster from Hinton and one of the guitarists from the Murder Squad on defence. The Chilliwack goalie, whose name I never do get a bead on, is the first team goalie.
Junior is the second team goalie, JoMo Ratsloff makes second team defence — there was probably a death threat involved — and Gus is the other defenceman. Paul Davidson is the second team left wing together with his centre, and Freddy is the right winger.
They aren’t bad choices, not far from mine, except maybe I’d have put Dickie Pollard on instead of Gus or JoMo. Gus’ll look better in the photo, so I guess that’s okay. Jack’s already taken care of the important thing. This time the photographs are going to be black and white, so the future can’t turn us lime green.
Friesen gives a short speech to the rapidly thinning crowd and hands over the trophy, which Gus promptly grabs out of Gord’s hands and won’t give it back, skating around the ice with it and performing credible imitations of Serge Savard’s spin-o-rama move whenever anyone tries to take it from him. And eventually, because we can’t stay out on the ice and be heroes forever, we skate over to the gate and, one by one, leave the ice.
Someone pops the corks on a couple of bottles of cheap champagne and sprays them around, but the television crew has already packed it up and, without them around, no one is very interested in acting like jackasses. It occurs to me that if we could get rid of all the television cameras in the world there’d be a lot fewer jackasses to put up with.
A few guys shower — mostly those who’ve had the champagne squirted over their heads. Others don’t, including me. Esther comes in after a discreet interval, smiling. It’s really her I want more than a shower. I’m already in my street clothes, bundling my equipment into my locker. I plunk the helmet she bought me on a hook inside, close the door, and reach for her hand. “Let’s go home, babe. I’m about done with this.”
“No you’re not,” she says. “Your father and Claire are outside. They’re taking us out for dinner.”
“What about Wendel?”
“Him, too, of course. Gord is invited, and Jack, if he’s got the time.”
She’s right. I’m not done, and we’re not done. Spring is com- ing, I’ve got a family to take me out to dinner, and there are things to do, things to be. They’re going to be new things, different, and difficult, some of them. Maybe the only thing I’m done with is hockey.
Who am I kidding? Maybe I’ll coach a Midget team next fall, maybe teach them — and their parents — not to be jerks. There’s a challenge, if ever I’ve seen one.
Hard to say what the rest of us will do. Go on living, I guess. I catch Wendel’s eye as I’m pondering this. He grins back, but says nothing. Wendel could do anything from here. Go back and play in the NHL, or stay here and work the claims he’s staked, grow old, and maybe drop a tree on his head someday if there are any left big enough to give him more than a slight headache. But whatever he does, he’ll do it with his family around him.
Christ, it’s got me biting my lip thinking about all this stuff. Yeah, I can now imagine a future, and I can imagine it without getting frightened or sentimental. Let the liars tell their lies, let the fools pump up their megaproject paradise. In the end, every damned one of them will collapse, not because the ground beneath us is unstable the way Cranberry Ridge is, but because the future is here, among the things we can renew and rethink and rescue from the rubble and waste we’ve already made. Let the young play their games. That’s their right, their job, and their burden. I’ve got the rest of a life to work on.
THIRTY-NINE
THAT’S THE STORY OF the last Mantua Cup tournament and the story of my life, as much of it as I know. Other people might tell it differently, I guess, but that would make it another story, someone else’s. There’s just one more thing I want to add.
The wedding will be in May. The only thing we haven’t figured out is what James and Wendel are going to be doing during the ceremony. I keep teasing Wendel that he ought to be the ring bearer, wear a velvet suit with short pants. I know James would like to be the best man, but that job has to go to Gord because he is, you’ll agree, the best man. The others — there will be lots of them — will be ushers, I guess, and ush people. And there will be a hush over everything and everyone as I slip the ring onto Esther’s slim, strong fingers, because the world, for once, will be as it ought to be, and as it is.
The Last of the Lumbermen Page 27