The Last of the Lumbermen (2 page)

TWO

S
NOW IS BLANKETING THE
ground outside the bedroom
window the next morning, another thirty centimetres of
it, and my brain
is circling and recir
cling something Gord said to me a few days
ago at practice. He was saying something philosophical about
time — feeling it in his own bones, I guess.
The two of us were standing along the boar
ds, pretending, like we usually do, that the practice
was for the other players. He was telling me he
thought time operated like a freight train.

“And you don't care what
train you're on, as long as it keeps rolling on?” I asked.

He leaned forward to flick a stray puck back
to where Wendel and a few others were
taking slapshots at Stan Lagace. “No,” he answered. “This train
stops for everything. Normal people toss their baggage into the
boxcars and jump on. But in this town, most people just
stand in the middle of the tracks and let the
train run over them.”

“I hate it when you talk politics,”
I said. “I never understand a word you're saying.”

He br
ushed aside my try at laughing him off. “Sur
e you do. And I wasn't finished. I was going to say that you do something different from everyone.”

I nodded my head as if I agreed
and
understood what he was talking about. “Different how?”

“You,” he said,
“keep your baggage hidden inside your head, and you don't go anywhere near the tracks.”

I shr
ugged, but said nothing — hard to say what
he was onto with this. He might have just been feeling
foolish about playing a kid's game at his age and
was taking it out on me, or he might have been
up all night reading some philosophy book. Like I
said, with him I'm never sure.

He fixed me with a stare that
was just this side of a glare. “I was just
thinking that the train must have given you one hell
of a rough ride once upon a time. You
act like a man who doesn't want a past or a future.”

I decided
he must be feeling
his
private freight train bearing
down on him. But geez, did I have to get
on it? “We have two games this weekend,” I answered. “How's that for a future?”

He rolled
his eyes and skated off to toy with a
loose puck, and I skated after him. “So,” I said. “Why do
you
keep on playing?”

He laughed out loud. “Because I
can. And because” — he jerked the thumb of his
glove at Jack, who was across the rink lec
turing Junior about something — “somebody has to protect
you two clowns.”

I let that one go, no chippy remarks about
the durability of dirigibles or the Michelin Man. I've
learned to listen to Gord, and not just because he's the size of a freight train.

I
SIT UP IN
bed, cantilever my legs onto the floo
r. On the birdfeeder I put up outside
the bedroom window, two whiskey jacks are
arguing over something, stopping now and again to peck
at the window so I'll get up and feed them: one
of my smaller plans that's run amok.

I dress, find some
bread to silence the birds, and I'm back
at the Coliseum by ten. Except for a slight pinging in my right ear and an odd sensation between my shoulder blades, I
seem to be a reasonable version of myself.
My lower back has seized up, but it usually punishes me the morning after a game.

No
one seems to think it's odd that I'm up and
around this morning, acting more or less normal —
not Esther at breakfast, not Gord when
he arrives at the Coliseum. Hell, even our Newfoundland dog,
Bozo, seemed to think I was okay when Esther sent her in to lie on my face to help me wake up.

I don't
tell Esther how little I remember about the end of
the game. If I went around declaring an emer
gency every time I get a bump on my backside, they'd
have named a hospital ward after me a long time ago.

Gord you've
met. He's my winger on the Mohawks, all two hundr
ed sixty pounds of him, and my best friend. Esther
you might be wondering about. The red hair and Je
Reviens perfume in the dressing room last night was
hers. She also drove me home in the 4x4 last night — her truck.

Esther did mention this morning over breakfast that she
woke me several times during the night to make sure
I wasn't slipping into a coma, but that's her
standard practice whenever I get whacked hard during
a game. Her training as a nurse kicks in, and she
sets the alarm so she can flip my eyelids every
hour or so. She does it without much to-do. In
her mind, it's part of the deal. My eyeballs must have
stayed where they were supposed to, because I
woke up in my own bed. If she believes I'm
okay, then I'd better act like it.

Except, really, I don't
feel
like it. While Esther and Gord yak, I
wander over to look at the display of photographs in
the Coliseum lobby. It's a display of the team photos
of each team that won the old Mantua Cup, twenty
years of them. I'm probably the first person to look
at them for longer than a few seconds in the
last ten years.

There are good reasons why nobody
ever looks at these photographs. First off, there hasn't been a Mantua Cup tournament for twenty-one years. Second, no Mantua team ever won the
Cup, and who wants to look at a bunch of
scratchy-faced goons from somewhere
else when your own town is full
of them, live and in
living
colour.

And speaking of
colour, the idiot who installed the display put tubes of
fluorescent light right above the photos. You know what
light does to colour photos? After two or three
years every uniform turns the same limey yellow, and
so do the faces. These photos make it look like Mantua
hosted hockey tournaments for teams from outer space.

That's not far from
the truth, actually. Everywhere I've been in
the northern part of this country, the hockey ar
enas are the primary sites for local extraterr
estrial activity. Mantua is no better or worse. Most days
during the winter, the Coliseum is about as close
a glimpse as you can get to alien life without
having to be an astronaut. If space aliens walked into
Mantua most citizens would simply assume the arena must
be closed for the day. If it was a full-fledged
UFO
invasion, they'd assume there must be a hockey
tournament about to start. Not worth stopping the pickup for
a look-see either way.

Me? I'm Andrew William Bathgate, hockey player
and minor industrial real estate magnate, a.k.a. hockey never-was
and landswapping sleazeball. I was born right here
in Mantua. Then I left town for a long time, which
might be why — not counting last night's whack on
the noggin — I'm able to appreciate the other
worldly side of this place. I'm a homer and an
alien at the same time, two men in one body
in more ways than one. Gord says I've got
a sixty-year-old head on a thirty-year-old body.
He's talking about my grey hair, but he's right in other ways.

I'd better tell you about Mantua.
It's a city of 80,000 people that a
few decades ago was a much smaller town nestled a
round the junction of two rivers in Northern British Columbia.
In the old days, Mantua had one industry — logging the
forests and cutting them into spaghetti — and two kinds of recreation: making money and getting drunk. It isn't much
different today, except that it has a lot
fewer trees to be logged and cut up, along
with a new form of recreation: worrying about whe
re the jobs are all going. Or, for
those few citizens with extra brain cells and some perspective, worrying about the town's futu
re.

Then there's the Mantua Memorial Coliseum. Forget
the grand name. It's really just an ordinary ar
ena that holds two-thousand-or-so people if it's packed
tight — which it never is. It got its fancy name
when some local politician realized that Mantua was named after
a city in Italy and decided that since Rome had
a famous Coliseum, Mantua, Italy must have had one too
— maybe a slightly less fabulous one, but a Coliseum either
way. And since Mantua, B.C. is named after Mantua,
Italy, it followed that
we
ought to have a Coliseum too.

The “Memorial” part is
a bit more complicated. Some claim it's because it's the
second Coliseum built here. The first one was built
in 1963, a couple of years after the
original hockey arena, the plain old Mantua Civic Arena,
collapsed and burned after a big snow. The folks
in charge didn't learn much from having the
old arena collapse under a load of snow. The
Coliseum they built to replace the Civic Arena survived
just two winters before
its
roof collapsed after a
snowstorm. Nothing very memorable took place in the two years
the first Coliseum stood up to the elements, so damned
if I can say what it is we're supposed to
be remembering with the Memorial tag on the third
arena. Maybe it's to remind the janitors to shovel the snow off the
roof every once in a while.

And no, neither the Memorial Coliseum nor the one
it replaced resembles the one in Rome. The first
Mantua Coliseum was like hundreds of other hockey
arenas across the country. The
Memorial
Coliseum
is identical except for the two large sets of
steel girders cantilevered across the outside to keep
its
roof from collapsing.

The steel
girders were supposed to solve the snow pr
oblems, but they've been a mixed success. Every few years since
the building opened there've been problems with the roof, including one time when a civic worker who was up ther
e with a machine blowing the snow off fell th
rough, machine and all, and broke both legs. I
wasn't in town for that one, but things being what
they are in Mantua it's even money he was up
there with the Zamboni. Crazier things have happened.

I played scrub hockey
in the old Civic Arena every Saturday morning
until I was eleven. It was a great old
building, built completely of wood thirty or forty years
before, and its natural ice may explain why I'm almost
as good a swimmer as a skater. With the
climate around Mantua — we're either coming or
going from a major blizzard or a major
thaw — there were more than a
few games where the skating rink looked more like a small lake.

I have a more pleasant memory
of the old arena's steamy dress- ing r
ooms, with their pot-bellied wood stoves and unpainted benches, and of
the scarred wooden walkways that led to the ice
— when it was ice, that is. Except for the
boards and a few signs, there wasn't a spot
of paint anywhere in that building, so it was
like being inside a giant cabin. Oh, yeah. There's
one other memory I have of it: the day it collapsed.

It was a Saturday, and it
had been snowing for what seemed like weeks. I was supposed
to play that morning, and I set off unsupe
rvised and happy through the unploughed streets
with my skates hanging on my stick, dressed up in
the Montreal Canadiens uniform that had me permanently
in trouble with my Toronto Maple Leafs-outfitted friends.
But when I arrived, I found a block-long pile of
splintered timbers, with a giant bonfire blazing away
in the exact spot where I'd been going to suit up for hockey.