The Last of the Lumbermen (7 page)

“Just trying to helpful.”

I see
him wave his arms in the air as the door closes. “Sure, Weaver,” his voice drifts back from the hallway. “Go do yourself.”

Jack doesn't come out of his
office until I've finished shaving down the last stick. Judging f
rom the look on his face talking to Junior made
his pissy mood worse, so I let him be. He
looks at me and glowers before he returns my
courtesy. I bundle the sticks together with some black tape
and put them in my locker, then climb onto
the training table to do my stretching routine. My
lower back still feels fairly loose, but the earlier tightness
in my chest has worked its way from mild up
to a solid medium. When I poke my finger along
my breastbone above the heart there's another sensa
tion. It isn't quite pain, but it ain't muscle stiffness either.

I start into a long-familiar routine: both
knees up to the chest, hold that for thirty or forty
seconds, then one knee at a time. Then I take
a break — this is part of the routine,
too — and stare at the bare light
bulb above my head. This isn't just because I'm fr
om the Satchel Paige school of exercise. I am, but
this isn't to avoid doing the next stretch. I've
done some of my best thinking lying on this table staring
into the light bulb. And right now, I've got
some items to think through.

One of them is how to get along
better with Wendel. He really isn't such a bad
kid — just a little righteous, that's all. He's pr
obably like his father must have been, but smarter
about it, or faster — at least on the ice.

How do I know that? Well,
if I explain it, I have to explain a nightmar
e, and nobody can explain their nightmares. So let
me put it together for you as a straight-up story, and we'll forget what it does to my head to remember it.

EIGHT

I
WOULDN'T
SAY I KNEW
Wendel's father well. He was
a guy I had couple of on-ice run-ins with.
Leo Simons played defence for the then-newly minted Mantua
Mohawks both years I came up with the Christian Lions.
The first year, Mantua blew their first
two games and we didn't get to play them. The
second year, we drew Mantua in the f
irst round. Early in the second period I cross
checked Leo head-first into the boards, and he
came up swinging. We both got five minute
majors for fighting, and I got an extra two
for cross-checking. He was decent with his fists, but
that was about it: he was slow, ugly
with the puck, and he couldn't read a forward
to save his soul. Wendel gets his talent fr
om Esther's side of the family, I guess.

Leo didn't strike me
as a speed demon off the ice, either.
For sure he didn't have it to protect
his girlfriend from a flash like me. But now that
I think back on it, I thought everyone was
slow-witted then, so who's to say what Leo Simons was
really about. He turned out to be a pretty decent guy.

I know what you're thinking: I
was the asshole, giant economy size. I was a twenty-year
-old guy and when you're that age it isn't who
or what you are that counts, it's what you
do and what you get. I was Mr. Can Do. Can score, can stickhandle, can drink, can score with the concession girls at will. My undershorts
weren't getting knotted up with a lot of deep thoughts in those days.

I did play some hockey in those tournaments.
I potted eleven goals in the five games of that
second tournament. Don't know why that statistic has stayed with me.
I don't recall much of anything from the
first tournament, but I must have scored a
few in that one, too. They named me first all-star
in the first tournament, though I only made second all-star
in the second. Maybe the reason I can't remember
anything about the first tournament is that I was
either drunk, asleep, hungover, or on the
ice the whole time I was there. Not one
second reading the Bible or thinking deep thoughts. The second
tournament, as you know, I got a few other things done.

The way they selected the
all-stars for the second tourney was probably a message to
us not to come back, because though we creamed
every team we played I was the only Lion named
to an all-star team. And when they presented us with
the trophy and the two thousand dollars in prize
money after the final game, they made a bigger to-do of
calling the all-stars down onto the ice than they did
of presenting us with the Cup. The player who beat
me out for first all-star centre was a sorry-looking
kid from Northern Alberta whose team we knocked out
in the semis. I scored two goals in that game,
and the player we had checking the kid flattened him
every time he crossed our blueline. I'd have been surprised
to hear he'd gotten a shot on goal in that
game, unless he shot it from behind his own net.

After the trophy presentation, we
— my two closest friends on the team, Neil DeBerk
and a Metis kid named Mikey Davidson — pulled our sha
re of the trophy cash, cadged more f
rom the other players, and caught a taxi out
to the local bootlegger's place. We drove thr
ough a snowstorm for half an hour, filled the
taxi's trunk and most of the back seat with bee
r, skidded the thing back to the Coliseum, and unloaded
the contents through the emergency door of the bus. Then we told Mantua and its snow banks what they could do with one another, and headed south.

By the time we were
three hundred klicks down the high- way the
snow had turned to sleet, and everyone was loaded —
including the coach, who'd been drinking all weekend anyway, even
during the games. By the time we reached the
junction where the roads divide off to the
Okanagan Valley or through the Fraser Canyon to Chilliwack
and the coast, it was fifteen degrees warmer and raining.

The
bus driver pulled in at the junction's Greyhound depot
so we could empty our tanks. In a fog, I r
emember everyone piling out of the bus, shouting and banging on
the hoods of parked cars as we navigated our way
through the muddy lot to the depot. As I left
the bus myself I noticed the coach was passed out
in his seat, not stirring a muscle. I thought about
waking him up, saw his silver mickey in his lap, and
decided he'd appreciate sleep more than a piss-call. That was the first of the big mistakes I made.

I guess because
I'd been the instigator of the beer buy and the
coach was in dreamland I got the perfectly lousy
idea that I was now responsible for keeping things together
. As I watched my teammates stumble and trip over one
another as they wended their way across the parking
lot to the washrooms, I saw the bus driver —
a mean-eyed middle-aged French Canadian I'd run into at
every bar I drank in while we were in
Mantua — wending pretty erratically himself.

Bad sign. I crawled back into
the bus and checked the map compartment to the left
of the driver's seat. There were a
couple of mickeys of rye in it, both empty.
NOW
WHAT?
I remember thinking.

I had the answer: I
would have to take charge. I paused to take
my leak behind the bus, then counted out my teammates
as, one by one, they staggered back onto the bus.
Everyone present and accounted for — except the driver.

I staggered into the
depot, where I found him in one of the
washroom cubicles, passed out on the toilet seat. I
crawled over the top of the cubicle and made a half-hearted try at slapping him awake — half-hearted because he was plainly far too hammer
ed to wake up, let alone drive. So I pulled him
across my shoulders and carried him back to the
bus, where I somehow dropped him into an empty
seat. When he slid to the floor like the bundle
of irresponsible crap he was, I let him lie
there. That way, at least, he'd puke on the
floor and not all over the equipment bag on the
seat beside him.

If I'd been in my right mind, I would have
realized that my blood alcohol was as topped up as
everyone else's. But wasn't I Billy Menzies, the Bull Goose
Loony of the Chilliwack Christian Lions, tournament all-star, Bedpost Diver
Supreme, and All-Round Ace? I was in charge,
and the power surge it gave me convinced me I
was sober. And because I was sober and in
charge, wasn't I the one to drive the goddamn bus? What could be more logical?

Never mind that I'd never
driven a bus before, that I wasn't licensed to
drive anything more complicated than a pickup truck, that
by getting behind the wheel I was voiding any insurance
the team held, and that the bus was an old,
rickety International Harvester school bus with a two-speed stick shift that'd
been giving the Frenchman trouble. I was Mr
. Can Do, Captain of the Mantua Cup Champions, the
captain of the ship, driver of the bus.

I took charge.
To sober up my teammates I yanked down every window
on the bus that would open. It had warmed up
enough that they weren't going to freeze to
death, and even if they could, alcohol doesn't freeze. A
few of them, including Neil and Mikey, simply went
to sleep with their heads hanging out the open window,
and a couple more nodded off face up
on the seats with their legs sticking out. And then,
though I can't quite remember this, I must have settled
behind the wheel and started the motor. I remember
the gears grinding as I slipped the old bus into
gear, and eventually I had us lurching through the parking lot and onto the highway.

THAT'S THE LAST THING
I remember
clearly. The rest I've had to piece together.
It seems I got twenty klicks down that highway befor
e I let the bus veer across the centr
e line on a curve that was sharper than it looked.
I must have been thinking about something else, maybe the
rhythm of the windshield wipers or a goal I'd scor
ed during the tournament, or the red-headed girl I'd bopped.
Or maybe I wasn't thinking or seeing anything at all.

That didn't matter. What did was the semi-trailer,
headlights on high beam, horn blasting, bearing down on me
in the same lane. I remember that it didn't seem
to be bearing down on me very fast, and that I
seemed to have time on my hands. I remember
trying to wrench the bus out of the semi's path, but nothing happening.

The semi and the bus brushed one
another, coming together just behind where I sat, and
I heard the sickening sound of metal shrieking and
grinding and tearing away, and inside that sound there
was another, utterly distinct one, a sound that was
far more strange and sickening, and one that
I couldn't possibly have heard.

I did hear it. I
couldn't have seen what I saw next either, but I
saw that as absolutely as I heard that sickening
sound-withina-sound. In the split second after impact, I looked
up to the rear-view mirror that had to
have been ripped off by the initial impact and I
saw human body parts tumbling through the illuminated
air between the torn side of the bus and the
jagged and receding metal of the semi. Three heads,
an arm, part of a leg. Each one of the
heads hit the tarmac as I watched, and then, I
swear, bounced back up as high as the windows.

Then they were gone, and the bus
was cartwheeling across the road into a field of sagebrush.

I WOKE UP IN
a Kamloops hospital, a nice old building overlooking the city
. From the windows I could see the North
Thompson River stretching out to the northeast, languid and serene, and the huge weeping willows of Riverside Park where the North and equally languid South Thompson conjoined.

The instant I woke up I knew Mikey
was dead, because his had been one of the heads bouncing
along the pavement. I found out later that Neil was
dead too, along with two others, one of whom lost both
legs from just below the knees. I had a
third degree concussion, and a lot
of bruises from bouncing around the bus
after it flipped, but otherwise I was unhurt. Aside from
the bus driver, who must have been wedged between
the seats and the coach, I was the only person on the bus without broken bones.

The hospital nurses
were decent enough, given what I'd done. Everyone around
the hospital seemed to know the whole story: I'd been
driving the bus, and blood tests had revealed how far
I'd been into the impaired zone. One nurse told
me I'd been interviewed by the highway patrol
while I was still half-conscious, and I guess I confessed
to everything in lurid detail, including what I'd seen in the
bus mirror. So everyone knew. And everyone,
including most of the nurses, was giving me the cold stare.

Before I was discharged from hospital
the police charged me with impaired driving and
vehicular manslaughter. Then, as if they'd decided that my goose
was properly trussed and ready for cooking, they
eased up and released me into the custody of my
mother and stepfather on five thousand dollars' bail. Neither Fr
ed nor my mother said a word to me
during the four-hour drive from Kamloops to
Chilliwack. That was fine with me. I didn't have anything to say, no excuses to make.

For
a week I stayed in the house while my br
uises healed. I tried to read, watched a lot
of television, some of it religious, and I stared
at the wall. Before too long, I realized that
while my body was going to heal there wer
e some other parts of me no one could put a
bandage on. I thought about killing myself or making a
break for it, but I wasn't capable of either
. I'd take my lumps, do my time in jail, accept
whatever anyone wanted to dish out to me.