The Last of the Lumbermen (3 page)

The caretaker, I hear
d later, had just finished building a fire in
the dressing room's stove when he heard
the building rafters begin to creak and groan. He
only had time, the story goes, to rip the photographs
of the Mantua Cup champions off the lobby walls and
run out into the street before the building came down.

As I stood there with my
teammates watching the fire lick at the wreckage, it
came to me that if the building had collapsed just an hour later I would have been
one of about thirty-or-so seventyfive-pound potatoes roasting in
the bonfire. The thought scared me so much I
didn't play hockey for three years. By then, my
parents' marriage had also collapsed, my mother had packed
me up and moved south, and construction on the first
Coliseum was nearly complete.

THIS MORNING ESTHER SEEMS
to be finding whatever
Gord has to say particularly fascinating, and it fr
ees me to look over the photographs of the
Mantua Cup champions. I half-hear the end of the conversation
with Gord, but then I tune out again and
miss him leaving for the dressing room and Jack's
office. The next thing I know, Esther is standing behind
me with her hand on my shoulder.

“What's up,
Andy?” she asks. “Wondering who all those little green men we
re?”

“Nope, I know them all,” I answer, mor
e truthfully than she realizes. “Goofs like me. Only younger.”

“You're only as old as you decide to be,” she says.

“T
oday my backside is telling me I'm about two hundr
ed years old,” I tell her. “I guess
that makes me old enough to be your greatg
reat-grandfather, no?”

That makes her laugh. It's one of my
biggest talents, actually, and an important one too, because Esther
says she can't resist a man who can make her
laugh. She's tall, red-haired — stacked, I guess you'd
say if you were in a bar drinking beer
and talking loose. For sure, she's shapely for a
woman in her forties. But she also has an unusual sort
of distance to her, an aloofness, “poise” I think
the word is. It isn't the sort of thing
guys around here are used to, and for
her that's part luck of the draw, part design.
Since she works as a sex therapist, the only one
in Mantua, a certain degree of aloofness is fairly important.

Yeah, yeah, I know what
you're thinking. No. She doesn't. She
talks
with her clients, usually couples, gives them advice and gets them to talk to one another with a bit of
honesty. It's a tough job, because most of them sec
retly hope she's there to teach them how to have kinky sex.

Mo
re than a few of her clients around town
probably suspect I know more about their sex
lives than I should. They're correct. Esther happens to
have a photographic memory, and she can repeat conversations she's had days ago, word for wo
rd.

“Andy,” she's saying. “Earth calling Andrew Bathgate …”

I shake myself loose from
the cobwebs and turn to face her. “What?” I ask. “I was thinking about something.”

“So tell me.”

Her
e I have to lie to her. “I was
thinking that you're the only woman I've ever run across who has freckles on her butt.”

She
goes for it. “Oh, really? And just how large
is your sample?”

“Large enough,” I say.

“There's a surprise,” she
answers, dryly. “Men who go around inspecting women's
behinds for freckles usually don't get far — or live very long.”

She
is
, for the record, the only woman
I've ever seen with freckles on her butt. My
lie was that this wasn't
exactly
what I was thinking about.
You see, I was thinking about what she'd do if
she knew that I first saw those freckles while
she was still a post-teen working the concession booth at
the the last Mantua Cup tournament. And I was imagining what
she'd say if I told her I was looking at
my own face in two of those greeny-yellow photographs inside
the glass display cases. Mantua never won its own cup,
but I played on two cup winners. The last two.
And I'm the reason there hasn't been one since. For me, that's the darkest thicket in the forest.

THREE

W
ENDEL IS AT THE
Coliseum's front doors. Wendel
is Esther's son, and one of my teammates. He's
twenty years old, tall, blond, and built like Superman.
Whatever I may think of him personally, which
is occasionally not very much, he's the best hockey
player Mantua has ever produced, and he's pretty
damned close to being the best player I've ever
played with — or against.

Wendel doesn't have
mixed feelings about me. It's hard to say what he
likes least: having to play hockey on the same team
as me, or me living with his mother. He
bangs open the big steel-andglass doors as if they're
made of balsa wood and tramps toward us.

“Mom!” he
hollers, as if he's seeing her for the first time
in a month. “I was hoping I'd find you here!”

“What do you want?” she answers.

“I need to borrow the pickup.”

“Sorry, but I need it to drive Andy to physio.”

Now that
I've been identified as the official obstruction, he offi
cially notices me. “Oh, hi, Andy,” he says. “Can't
handle the heavy traffic anymore?”

“You saw Bellado bounce me off the boards last night,” I answer.

Wendel is typically to-the-point. “Sure. Why don't you r
etire? You were playing like you already had most of last night.”

Esther cuts him off. “Andy can't retire because your mother won't let him. So put that in your pipe and smoke it, M
r. Smartypants.”

“I don't smoke,” he snaps. His voice is prim.

Wendel
doesn't
smoke. He doesn't drink, either
. He'll gladly explain to you that it's nothing personal, he
just doesn't have the time for petty vices. He's the
most serious young man I've ever run across, and
that's part of our mutual problem. When he's not playing
hockey, he's busy with his tree-planting business or
attending some ecology seminar or petitioning the government — or trying
to get the broken-down Jeep Cherokee he r
efuses to get rid of fixed, and not just because he's
converted it to run on french fry oil he gets from a couple of the local restaurants.

If you've deduced that Wendel is a little, well, di
fferent, you're on. Around Mantua, it's close
to unanimous that Wendel is cracked. No one minds the
entrepreneur stuff, and they don't even mind his
greenhead ideas. What gets them is that Wendel
could be in New York playing for the Rangers, who
drafted him in the first round eighteen months ago, and
offered him a pile of money to sign.

Wendel doesn't
wish
to play in the
NHL
. He told them,
and I quote, “I've got other priorities.” Like playing with
a bunch of boneheads and duffers for the Mantua Mohawks?
That's right. He also wants to plant trees wher
e nobody thinks they'll grow, and he's dedicated himself
to driving every government in the country crazy with his
demands and schemes. Not to mention his demands of me: leave my mother alone; stop skating like
a porcupine; backcheck more; retire from hockey.

Right
now he wants Esther's 4x4 to transport some
panels of glass out to his greenhouses. He's
the only tree planter in the area with
his own greenhouses, of course. Shortly after he turned
down the Rangers he decided that if the seedlings used
for local reforestation were grown locally they'd be better acclimatized, and the survival rates would be
higher than the current lousy rates. Along with that
— and this part I agree with —
it would create employment locally. Sound like a
pipe dream to you?

It wasn't. Easier than most people could borr
ow fifty bucks from their best friend, Wendel finagled
three hundred grand from the government so he
could mess around with his theory, along with
a permit from the public utilities commission that for
ces one of the pulp mills — at their expense —
to pump excess steam from their power plant to heat the greenhouses.

The greenhouses
are going up just fine. In fact, they'd be
ahead of schedule except that the unemployed roofers he hi
red as builders suffer from perpetual hangovers, and
keep dropping the glass they're supposed to be installing.

Wendel, here as with
everything else, isn't letting up. “Christ, Mom,” he whines, “Let
the old fart take a cab or something. There's probably nothing w
rong with his back anyway.”

Esther glances in my direction, her hand
on her hip. I shrug, and turn back to the
photographs. “Rent a truck,” she says, after a moment's consideration. “I need the pickup for later
.”

“Can't you go get his car?”

“It doesn't have four wheel drive.” That's another of
Esther's quirks. She doesn't like driving anything that doesn't have
four wheel drive.

“Well, he can drive it, can't he?”

I see Esther's resolve start to
waver, so I toss my keys to him. “If
you bring my car over here you can take the pickup.”

He catches them easily, grimaces while I tell
him where it is — a few blocks away
— then yanks the pickup keys from Esther's outst
retched hand.

“Park it in the usual spot and stick the
keys on the hook under the bumper, will you?” I
say. “And see if you can manage not to
put any dents in it on the way over here.”

He waves the handful of keys at me as he kicks open the Coliseum doors. “I'll try real hard,” he answers, without
looking back. “But there's a lot of fire hydrants around here.”

JUST LIKE ESTHER DOESN'T
know
I saw her freckles all those years ago, no
one in Mantua knows I'm in those team photographs in the
lobby. It isn't that they've forgotten. They never
knew. And no, it isn't because the photos ar
e so distorted that I'm unrecognizable. If all
that was hiding me was a green face, they
have been able to read my name in the list
of players beneath the photos, right? But that's the thing, see. I went by a different name then.

Let's start with Chilliwack and its Christian Lions.

Chilliwack is a
town in southern B.C., in those days about the same
size as Mantua. But where Mantua has always been
loaded to the rafters with logging equipment, sawdust burners, and dr
unk loggers, Chilliwack was heavy on car dealerships, skating rinks with
sturdy rooves, dairy farmers, and evangelical churches. While
I lived there, there were so many
Bibles being thumped on Sunday morning that it sounded like
jungle drums. But since this is Canada, they also play
hockey in Chilliwack, and one year someone got the idea
that Chilliwack should send a team of nice Christian boys like me to win the Mantua Cup.

While we
were winning our first Cup for Jesus a few
of us slipped seriously south of the path of righteousness, doing
our share of drinking, bar-fighting, and carrying on.
When we returned home to Chilliwack, several ministers — friends
of the Car Dealers Association that sponsored us — decided
that too many native sons had come back with beer
stains on their Bibles, and the next year they tried to stop us from going back.

If we
hadn't had the argument that we needed to defend
the Cup we'd won — and the commercial honour of
Chilliwack's car dealers — the pious ministers might have had
their way and the world — my world — would be
quite different. As it was, each one of
us had to make solemn promises not to drink or fight or chase around before they'd send
us off to win a second championship for
the Lord. We made the promises, but
once again we didn't give Jesus anywhere near as much
attention as we did hockey and Molson Canadian. And because
of that, my name is Andy Bathgate and I live in Mantua.

Back then I was
called Billy Menzies. A couple of years after my parents
divorced and my mother and I left Mantua, my
mother married a man named Fred Menzies, a good
Chilliwack Biblethumping car dealer and one of the Chilliwack Christian
Lions' sponsors. Fred Menzies insisted on adopting me, and,
under pressure from my mother to
help her rebuild the family, I went along with
it. According to her, my real father
was spending his time and energy staring down the neck
of an open whiskey bottle, and since he hadn't shown
up to raise any objection to my being adopted, why should
I? A little while after the adoption went through,
Menzies insisted I use my second name, William. That got
shortened to Billy, because you can't play hockey
— even in Chilliwack — with a name like William.

I didn't much like old
Fred, but at least he was there. And
once I got over myself, I took to being Billy
Menzies like a duck to water. Billy Menzies — at
the beginning, anyway — was kind of admirable: quiet, self-confident, and even studious.

As
a beginner in hockey, Andrew Bathgate had been
a defenceman who didn't score much, took too many penalties,
and made most of his stops by crunching other
kids into the boards. But as Billy Menzies, comforted by
the rock-solid arenas that never saw more than
a dusting of snow, and after being sent o
ff by Fred to Vancouver for power-skating lessons,
my game improved. I was quick and smart, and
the coaches said I was born with soft hands. I even grew a little pious.

As
Billy Menzies I was good enough to be a star
in Junior B when I was seventeen. Probably I didn't
have the wheels to play higher than that — but
I didn't have the ambition either. When I wasn't drafted,
I let old Fred send me to Bible college in Oregon, which I didn't have much ambition for either. I
skipped as many of the Bible classes and church services
as I could get away with, got high marks in
the business courses, played some baseball, and chased after the Bible college girls.

The girls wer
e okay, I suppose, but they ran to type.
They had names like Lynette and Tracy, and they
all looked the same to me: thin, fine blond hair
, pale complexions, and angular faces and flabby bodies that instinct
told me would go to seed on them by the
time they were halfway through their twenties. They
were trailer-park princesses, no-brainers, Christian baby factories. If I
didn't know much else, I knew better than to settle for that.

The other thing I knew was that I wasn't cut
out for the life Fred Menzies had planned for
me. Not for piousness, not for Christian princesses, not for the
other Bible college nonsense. But I gave it a try
, hanging in for almost two years trying my damnedest
to please Fred because he was paying the shot, and
trying to please my mother, who spent a lot
of energy explaining to me that I didn't want to turn out like my real fathe
r.

I stopped trying when the college principal claimed I'd
gotten one of his princesses pregnant. I wasn't guilty as
charged, but someone had gotten her that way,
and she decided I was the best catch in the school.
So I cleared out about three seconds ahead
of being kicked out, and went home to Chilliwack. Fr
ed wasn't very happy about it, being a believer in how
young men ought to keep their weapons holstered
until marriage — I swear he really believed that — but he didn't say much.

I got an
apartment of my own with a couple of other guys,
went to work in a supermarket bagging groceries, and
settled down to figure out what to do with my
life. The figuring didn't go well, and before very
long I slipped to about where Andy Bathgate had been
headed — drinking too much beer, driving cars, and
going to every party I could find. The part of
me that remained Billy Menzies slipped into playing Senior hockey for the Chilliwack Christian Lions.