The man in the blue blazer seemed a little surprised, but he smiled and handed it over.
Travis cleared his throat. He knew the roaring was dying down, the cheers were stopping. They were quieting down to hear what he had to say.
His hand was shaking as he brought the microphone up to his face.
“Merci beaucoup, mes amis,” he began.
“C’est pour moi et les autres Screech Owls le plus grand honneur des nos vies de hockey…”
He continued without hesitation, his mind remembering perfectly the words and pronunciations that Nicole and Sarah had drilled into him.
He thanked the fans.
He thanked “le magnifique” team standing opposite, the Beauport Nordiques.
He thanked the Quebec Peewee Tournament organizers.
He thanked the City of Quebec.
He could have gone on. But no one–not any of the players on the ice, not Muck or any of the coaches, not one of the ten thousand fans–would have heard a word Travis Lindsay was saying over the enormous roar that went up.
The loudest roar of a most extraordinary day.
THE END
“Look outside!”
It seemed such an absurd order; Travis Lindsay could not yet see inside, let alone look out. His eyes were still sticky with sleep, his mind in another world. His own voice seemed like it belonged to some dimwitted creature, not even human, as he tried to speak into the cordless phone.
“Whuh?”
“Look outside!” Nish shouted again at the other end, loud enough this time that Travis’s mother, still standing by the bed after handing her son the telephone, heard and answered for him.
“He’s awake, Nish!” she called out towards the receiver. Travis blinked upwards. His mother was laughing at him as he struggled to surface from a deep, deep sleep.
“Nish is right,” Mrs. Lindsay said to Travis. “Get up and have a look.”
Travis rubbed his eyes. He checked the clock radio: 7:03 a.m. Too early even for school. And it was Saturday, wasn’t it? What was Nish up to?
“He’s moving, Nish!” Mrs. Lindsay called towards the receiver.
Travis set the phone down on his pillow and pushed back his covers. He instantly wished he could dive straight back under them, burrowing into their warmth and slipping back into the magnificent sleep that had just been stolen from him. He fought off the urge and struggled to his feet, stretching and yawning hard as his mother, still laughing, stepped back to let him pass. Behind her, Travis could see his father standing in the doorway with a cup of coffee in his hand. He was trying to blow onto the steaming cup, but he couldn’t purse his lips properly. He was laughing too. What on earth could be so funny about looking outside?
Travis scratched his side and chewed on the stale taste of sleep as he all but staggered towards the window. His mother reached out in front of him, yanking the heavy curtains back.
Travis reacted as if he’d just been blindsided by a hard check. The window seemed to explode with light, like a million flash-bulbs firing at once.
He stepped back, his hands over his eyes. In the background he could hear Nish’s voice squeaking like a mouse as he continued to shout over the telephone, which lay, completely ignored, on Travis’s pillow.
Travis rubbed his eyes hard, the light still flashing red and yellow and orange in the front of his brain. He rubbed and waited, peeking first through his fingers as he approached the window again. It was still too bright, the light like blinding needles, but slowly his eyes adjusted. Still squinting, he moved closer to the window, the glass quickly fogging with his breath, then clearing as he stood back slightly.
The world had turned to glass!
Travis looked out over the backyard, out past Sarah Cuthbertson’s big house on the hill, and off towards the river and the lookout that sat high over the town of Tamarack. Glass! Glass everywhere: shining, sparkling, silver down along the river, golden along the tip of Lookout Hill where the sun was just cresting, hard steel along the streets of the town that lay still shaded for the moment by the hills to the east.
The window was fogging up again. Travis pressed a fist against the cold glass, circling to clear the window. The condensation clung to his skin, cold and wet and tickling.
He blinked again. The sight reminded Travis of a counter at the jewellery store owned by Fahd’s uncle, diamonds shimmering under bright lights, expensive crystal glittering on glass displays.
A town truck was moving down River Street, heading for the road up towards the lookout. The truck was spreading a shower of sand, the silver road turning brown as the truck crept slowly along. But at the turn for the bridge and the hill, the truck kept sliding down River Street, the wheels spinning uselessly, the big vehicle turning, slowly, like a large boat, until eventually it crunched sideways into an ice-covered snowbank.
Travis could see children outside a home on King Street. They were stepping as if they were walking on a tightrope rather than a wide street. One went down, smack on his back, and slid helplessly. The other youngster leapt after the first one, spinning wildly.
There was an urgent squeak at Travis’s ear.
“Ya see it?”
Travis turned quickly, almost jumping. His mother was holding the phone out for him. He had forgotten all about Nish!
Travis took the phone. “Neat!”
“Whatdya mean, ‘neat’?” Nish’s voice now barked clearly over the telephone. “It’s awesome! It’s amazing! It’s unbelievable! C’mon–we gotta get out on it. Grab your skates!”
Nish didn’t even wait for an answer. He slammed his own phone down so hard Travis winced.
Grab your skates? It looked more like Travis should be grabbing a rope and a bucket of sand–perhaps even his father’s spike-soled golf shoes–to walk on that. But he saw Nish’s point: Tamarack had turned into the world’s largest skating rink.
“It’s called verglas,” said Mr. Lindsay after Travis had handed his mother back the cordless phone. “At least that’s what my friend Doug’s grandfather called it. He was an old Scot, and he said he’d seen it only three times in his life. This is the second time for me.”
“What is it?” Travis asked. He was back at the window, clearing a porthole with the side of his fist.
“You have to have a deep thaw followed immediately by a deep freeze–and no snow in between. It’s a freak of nature. Beautiful–but dangerous.”
Travis looked out and thought about the last week. Tamarack had seen record snowfalls through January–the snow was piled so high along the streets that pedestrians stumbling along the sidewalks couldn’t see the cars passing alongside them. But then, on the first of February, a south wind came in, bringing record-high temperatures. Nish had even turned up for hockey practice in shorts and sunglasses.
Then it had rained. Not enough to melt the snow, but enough to turn the streets to ponds. And just last night the winds had suddenly shifted, and a bitter cold front had moved in from the north. The thermometer outside the kitchen window had fallen so fast it seemed to have sprung a leak. The cold was so deep that twice during the evening the Lindsays had gone to the window when maple trees in the backyard had cracked like rifle fire.
“That’s what Old Man Gibson called it,” said Mr. Lindsay. “Verglas. It don’t know what it means. Gaelic for something to do with ‘glass,’ I suppose. You can see why.”
“How long did it last?” asked Mrs. Lindsay.
“Only a couple of days. But if I had to pick two winter days out of my childhood I’d never want to forget, I’d probably take those two. Maybe because they closed the schools down and no one could even get to work.”
“They closed the schools?” asked Travis.
“It’s Saturday,” said Travis’s mother, crushing his hopes.
Mr. Lindsay went on, lost in his own memories: “They put chains over their car tires back then. That was before they sanded the roads. The chains would bite into the ice so they could get a grip. We used to grab ont
o the back bumpers of the cars and they’d drag us on our rubber boots up and down the streets.”
“Charles!” Mrs. Lindsay said abruptly.
But Mr. Lindsay was laughing, enjoying a sweet memory. “We called it ‘hitching.’ It was kind of like waterskiing, except it was winter, and we were being pulled around by cars, not motorboats.”
“You’re lucky you weren’t killed,” said Mrs. Lindsay.
“I guess,” Mr. Lindsay answered slowly. “But cars went a lot slower back then, and there weren’t as many on the road.”
“Still!” she said.
“You’re right. I wouldn’t recommend it now. But you kids should get out there and skate on it. It’s a once-in-a-lifetime experience.”
“You’ve seen it twice,” Travis corrected.
“Yes,” his father said. “But I was only young once.”
Mr. Lindsay went to the window. He was smiling, but it seemed to Travis a sad smile. Then his father turned, slapping his hands together to break the spell.
“You’d better get dressed, young man.”
Travis looked out in the direction his father had been gazing. A thick-set young man in a blue Screech Owls jacket and cap was churning full force around the corner, his skates digging deep where normally there would have been pavement.
The young skater kicked out suddenly and flew through the air–like a wrestler going for the throat–until he slammed, side down and laughing, onto the slope of the road. The ice offered no resistance, and followed by his stick, gloves, and hat, the youngster came spinning and sliding like a fat hockey puck straight towards the Lindsay driveway.
It was Nish, coming to call.
One by one, the Screech Owls found each other. It was as if centre ice had become the intersection of River and Cedar and Muck had blown his whistle for them all to assemble. Sarah was out–her long, graceful stride as powerful and elegant down River Street as it had ever been at the Tamarack Memorial Arena. Lars Johanssen, with two sticks over his shoulder, came kicking a puck between his skates along Cedar Street. Jeremy Weathers, stiff and unsure in his goalie skates, came with Dmitri Yakushev from the apartments down by the frozen river. Data, Fahd Noorizadeh, Gordie Griffth, Jesse Highboy, Andy Higgins, little Simon Milliken, Liz Moscovitz, Chantal Larochelle, Jenny Staples in her goalie skates and thick street-hockey pads, carrying a bent and torn street-hockey net over her shoulder. From the other direction, pushing an equally bent and torn net ahead of him as he skated towards the gathering of Owls, came Derek Dillinger.
“Not here!” shouted Nish, whose face was already beet red and covered in sweat.
“Where, then?” Jenny shouted, dropping the net with a clatter.
“The creek!”
Of course, the creek. Behind Derek Dillinger’s house was a large field belonging to Derek’s uncle, who grew corn and oats and raised beef on the edge of town. A creek ran from the woods and twisted down through the fields, past the school and the rink, and emptied into the river.
A few times in other winters they had gone out with shovels and cleared off an area for a game of shinny. It was hard work, though, and the ice was often bumpy, with cracks that could catch a skate blade and twist an ankle. Today’s ice, however, was as smooth as marble.
“Let’s go!” Derek shouted.
They skated down the streets and across the lawns. They dug in to go up hills and leaned back to go down them. They skated to the end of King Street, crossed the glassed-over highway, then slid down the embankment and under the barbed-wire fence–now rendered harmless by thick sleeves of crystal-clear ice–to where the frozen creek spread across the open field.
Nish had chosen well. At first they were content just to skate around the field, laughing as they danced through the corn stubble on the far side, and then barrelling together through a stand of bulrushes that snapped and shattered like fine glass as they passed, the sparkling shards ringing on the ice as they spun away.
“Let’s play!” Travis shouted. He was captain. He was taking charge.
Travis threw his stick down, and the others followed suit. Travis then waded into the pile, randomly grabbing up and tossing the sticks, half of them towards Nish, half towards Data.
“You two are the captains,” he said.
Travis finished dividing the sticks and stood back. “Pick up your sticks and stay with your captain,” he said. The Owls chased after their sticks, picked them up, and began looking around to see who was playing with whom. Sarah reached out and gently slapped Dmitri’s tuque; the two linemates were still together.
“No fair!” said Nish. “They got all the speed.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Travis said. “We’ll make them play into the wind.”
“Yeah,” Nish said, looking up with a sly grin. “Good idea.”
Travis told Jeremy to take one of the nets and start skating until he reached the gate at the far end of the field. Jenny was to take her net and head towards the fence by the road. The distance between the nets would be, approximately, four hockey rinks. The fences on either side of the field would form the “boards.”
“What’re the rules?” asked Fahd, who always had to know the rules.
“There are none,” said Nish, with a fake snarl.
“No body contact,” said Travis. “No hoists on goal. No slapshots. Everything else goes.”
And everything did. With no offsides, Nish, with his good wrist shot, could make a pass that almost took the puck out of sight before Travis, bolting across the field at top speed, caught up with it and came down, coasting, onto the flat ice of the creek and in on Jenny, who was backing up fast and kicking out her foam-rubber pads in anticipation.
Travis came in and stopped hard, the good sharp of his skates sending up a swirl of snow that temporarily blinded them both as it flashed like fireworks in the sun. Jenny instinctively turned from the spray, and Travis, laughing, tucked the puck behind her on an easy backhand.
“Cheater!” Jenny shouted. But she, too, was laughing.
Sarah and Dmitri got the goal back quickly on a European-style, circling, end-to-end “rush” that took almost five minutes and left the two of them, and every other Screech Owl, flat on their backs and gasping for air.
“In Russia,” Dmitri said, panting, “we call this bandy.”
“In Canada,” growled Nish, also short of breath and flat on his back, “we call it ‘hog.’”
“No,” said Dmitri, “really–bandy is a game. Curved sticks, a ball, a huge ice surface like this, and lots and lots of players. Hockey developed from it.”
“Russia invented hockey?” said Nish with enormous suspicion. “Is that what you’re saying?”
“As much as anyone else did, I guess.”
Nish howled with laughter. “And what else did you invent? Big Macs? Nintendo? The wheel?”
“Who do you think invented it?”
“We did, of course. The Stanley Cup is Canadian, not Russian–or perhaps you didn’t notice.”
“There are paintings,” countered Dmitri, “that show kids playing something that looks a lot like hockey in Holland more than five hundred years ago.”
“Paintings aren’t photographs,” said Nish.
“What?” said Sarah, sitting up, a look of astonishment on her face.
“You can paint anything you want. I want proof.”
“They didn’t have cameras five hundred years ago!” Sarah shouted.
“That’s just my point,” he said, smiling smugly. “Then there’s no real proof, is there.”
“You’re impossible!” said Sarah, scrambling to her feet.
“You’re nuts!” said Dmitri, also getting up.
“I’m right,” said Nish. “And you all know it.”
Travis lay on the ice, shaking his head in amazement at the ridiculous way Nish’s brain could sometimes work. He’d seen it in school a few times, and he’d seen teachers stare at Nish as if he’d just been dropped in on the classroom from another planet.
Everyone turned to see. At the far end of the field, four large figures were standing at the fence, trying to figure out how to get over. Then one climbed up, leapt over the top, and landed on his skates, sliding and shouting. It was Ty, the Owls’ assistant coach. And right behind Ty, also leaping over the iced-over barbed wire, was Barry, the other assistant, also in skates. And behind Barry, tossing over a pile of hockey sticks, was Mr. Dillinger, his bald head covered only with earmuffs, which seemed hopelessly inadequate.
And right behind Mr. Dillinger was Muck!
Mr. Dillinger’s brother, the farmer who owned these fields, must have telephoned him, and Mr. Dillinger–who could never turn down a chance to be a kid again–must have called the two assistant coaches, who also loved to play shinny.
But Muck?
Muck Munro wasn’t one for playing around. The coach often suggested to the Owls that a game of street hockey or a round of pond shinny was twice as good as a practice, but for him to come out and play as well was very, very unusual. He had that bad leg, after all, and sometimes it seemed he was having difficulty just getting through a hard practice.
But Muck was up the fence and over, his bad leg wiggling uncertainly for a moment as his skates hit the hard ice on the other side. The four figures came across the field to the rousing cheers of the Screech Owls, all of whom were now back on their feet and collecting their sticks.
Ty and Barry, both fine skaters who, as junior players, had for many years been coached by Muck Munro, were flying over the ice. Muck was coming slowly, businesslike. Mr. Dillinger, with his ankles bending terribly, was struggling, but even in the distance they could hear his high-pitched, uncontrolled laughter. Good old Mr. Dillinger. Game for anything. Any time.
Muck came up to the circle of Owls and stopped. He had his whistle around his neck. He blew it.
“Okay,” he said. “You’re loosened up. Let’s work on a few drills.”
“Not a practice!” Nish howled.
The Complete Screech Owls, Volume 2 Page 23