The Last of the Lumbermen (9 page)

“Alright,
you jerk-offs, get off my ice before
I come and run you down.”

I look at my
watch. It's past seven-thirty, and Gord and I
have been skating, side by side, for almost ten minutes without a word exchanged.

TEN

I
'M NOT A TOTAL
ditz. As soon as I
have my skates off, I call the Lotus Inn
from the phone in Jack's office. I have
a standard order for them: mu shu
pork, beef with black bean and garlic sauce, and their
special chow mein with shredded duck. Neither Esther nor
I are what you'd call hearty eaters, but Bozo
makes up for us. If she had her way
, she'd go off dog food permanently and live
on chow mein. So we usually order more
food than we'll need, eat what we like, and
let her have the rest. Most of the time, that
means she gets nearly all the chow mein.

The girl on the phone recognizes
my voice — or maybe it's just the beginning of the order.

“This M
r. Weaver, right?” she says, and reels off the rest of it.

I admit that she's
got me, and she says, “You come in fifteen minutes.
We very busy tonight, but you are special.”

I thank her without feeling special. The chef
at the Lotus knows what he's doing, and that makes him
a civic asset. My kind, anyway. Towns like Mantua
are generally a hell of a lot less notable
for the quality of their Chinese restaurants than for the
number of drunken after-hours diners who barf up
their dinners in the restaurant parking lots on their way
to their pickups. At the other Chinese food restaurants in Mantua, parking lot puke can get a foot
thick by this time of winter. The parking lot
outside the Lotus stays pretty clean — maybe
because it's the only Chinese restaurant in Mantua whose
chef knows what black bean sauce is and cooks dishes
like mu shu pork.

Gord and I change in silence,
another habit we've gotten into. If there's nothing to say
Gord doesn't talk, and I've learned to respect that.

Tonight,
neither of us bothers to shower — the leisurely
skate cooled us down to no-stink temperatures. I park
my gear in my locker, flip the padlock shut, and twirl the dial.

Gord is standing at
the door waiting. “I'll walk out with you,” he says.

I nod
without saying anything, and we walk to the front
doors and look out. It's snowing again, the relentlessly
calm kind of snowfall I've never quite seen anywhere else
but Mantua. It might add another twenty centimetres to
the snowpack before morning but not a single flake of
it will drift. You move through this kind of
snowfall or you move it out of your way,
but it never comes looking for you the way it does in the East.

“Pretty out there,” Gord
says, gesturing at the snow. “It might give you some problems getting up the hill.”

“I
always seem to make it up somehow,” I answe
r. “See you around noon.”

“Have a fine evening,” he says.

I squeeze out a laugh I don't much feel. “I should be so lucky.”

Gord glances at
me, sees that I don't want to explain why,
and lets it go. He opens the door, waves
at me without looking, and wanders off into the
snow to the rear of the Coliseum and his t
ruck. As I watch him go it occurs to me
that he's off to do the autopsy on that kid who was killed last night.

I'm already
late, but I pause for a moment by the case
that holds the team photo of the 1972 Chilliwack
Christian Lions. There's Mikey's handsome, dark face smiling through the veil of lime green, and Neil with his more serious
expression. For a brief second I can't find Billy Menzies,
but no, there I am, second row centre,
with one hand on the Mantua Cup, and a wide
grin on my face.

I'D PARKED THE LINCOLN
in the
VIP
spot next to the front door, so
I don't have as far to walk as Gord.
I park the car illegally all the time, actually.
Not just here, but all over town. The police
and metermen tolerate it because the car still has the
old City Hall Limousine sticker on the windshield — and
I keep telling them I bought the privilege with the ca
r. They know better, but what the hell.

I make
my own exit from the building, and by the
time I've reached the car my shoulders are spotting
with white. As I'm dusting off the car with
my elbows, I spot Wendel's wallet lying on the passenger seat. Dumb. I left the car unlocked.

At least it's
still there. Another of the advantages of small town
life, although this particular advantage isn't quite so automatic in Mantua
as it once was. I'm lucky, really.
Not a fabulous piece of luck, but I'll take it.

While the Lincoln warms up,
I turn on the dash light and flip open the wallet
to inspect its contents. It contains the usual: the driver
's licence in the window pocket, and behind that two
bank cards, one of them a Visa. In
the pocket across from those, hidden, is a plastic-cove
red birth certificate, and a couple of business cards
from Wendel's suppliers. Inside the billfold is twenty-nine dollars
— a twenty, a five, and two twos —
all fairly crisp. Behind them, folded several times and half-concealed by
a flap, is a piece of paper.

I pull the piece of paper out —
what the hell, I've gotten this far — and unfold
it beneath the dash light. It's another birth certificate,
and from the look of it, the original: name,
Wendel Alan Simons, born, Mantua, December 13, date of registration, February 17 the following year. I r
efold the document and put it back where it was, open the glove compartment, and push the wallet inside.

I'm
a couple of blocks away from the Coliseum when
it hits me: The dates on Wendel's birth certificate make
him twenty-one, not twenty. He's a year older than he's
supposed to be. I slam on the brakes, pull the
Lincoln over to the curb, and reopen the glove compartment.
I check the birth certificate again: same data. Then, on a
hunch, I check it against the plasticized one. That one
reads December 13 too, but a year later.
Wendel was born nine months after the last Mantua tournament.

By the time I pull
up in front of the Lotus Inn, my heart
feels like it's trying to crawl out of my thr
oat. Who am I kidding? Now I understand the Freudian
Slip: possible, hell. It's probable, and from
there the complications stick out like quills from
a porcupine's backside. Every time I try to get
my mind around the probability, I get
a muzzleful. They sting, each one, and the more
I paw at them, the more certain it is.

“Sonofabitch,” I say aloud. No, that's exactly wr
ong. The “bitch” involved isn't a bitch, she's Esther. And
her son is my son. This afternoon's upset takes on
an entire new dimension — and so do my chippy remarks about Wendel.

I pick up and pay for the Chinese food with
two twenty-dollar bills, by now completely distracted. I'm two blocks down
the street before I realize I gave the
cashier a seventeen-dollar tip. No wonder she knows me by name.

ESTHER AND I LIVE
near
the top of Cranberry Ridge, just west of the
city. It's a good place to live, barely
developed until recently, with fine farmland further
west and deep, rich soils. The ridge is one-hundr
ed-and-fifty-or-so metres above the river, and
a little colder than down below, with mor
e snow. And this winter, the drive up ther
e has been more of an adventure than it usually is.

The reason getting up Cranberry Ridge is an adventure is the same reason it's good farmland. It, and the entire
plateau that runs twenty miles to the west of town,
is composed of fine, soft clay up to two hundr
ed metres down, alluvial fan laid down ten thousand years
ago when the glaciers receded. Left undisturbed, Cranberry Ridge looks
much like any other piece of real estate in
the North, except that its deeper soil supports deciduous
trees, mostly poplar and birch. But if you
mess with this kind of soil it turns into quagmire,
and if it's disturbed, it will slide downhill. Because
of this, the original road up Cranberry Ridge was built
carefully and at small scale, and it was steep.
Even then it had its share of problems
— shifting grades and the occasional mudslide.

That changed a couple
of years ago after the City conned the government into building
a university in Mantua. Since every- one involved, locally or
otherwise, was a certified idiot with delusions of grandeur,
they set out to make appropriately grand, idiotic decisions. The
first one — and the biggest piece of idiocy —
was to choose the least stable building site within a
hundred-kilometre radius. They chose the top of
Cranberry Ridge instead of the derelict downtown where
everyone with half a deck knew it should have been.
The result is what aesthetes without common sense usually deliver:
a nice viewpoint for visiting dignitaries to see how bad
Mantua's air pollution is, and a flood of cost overruns.

The fun started
when the government's contractors tried to build a four-lane
highway up the side of the Ridge. The Ridge didn't co-operate.
The road-bed slipped, so the government contractors licked
their lips and rebuilt, gouging deeper into the clay
, which slipped again. Since then it's been the Chinese fi
re drill: underground springs opening up, new cr
eeks emerging, the Ridge slipping more, and so on.
The site where they're trying to build the
university buildings is nearly as unstable. Let's just say that the
announcement that a university was coming to town may turn out to be unintentionally prophetic.

All this would be amusing as hell if the road
hadn't already cost fifteen-million dollars they could have used
to rebuild the downtown, and — not incidentally —
if it weren't making getting home a royal pain
in the ass for Esther and me. I've had to
take the long way around more often than
I'd care to count since they started, and that
entails almost forty klicks of gravel road — mushy,
muddy gravel when it's been raining. When spring breakup comes
this April, after the latest round of construc
tion, the long way around is likely to be the only route we'll have.

Tonight, though, the road isn't too bad
— at least until I'm closing in on the hairpin
curve near the top. Right there, an overconfident
moron in a Ford Explorer loses cont
rol in the curve and does a one-eighty-degree four
-wheel drift in front of me. A second or
two elongates into an eternity, and I actually close
my eyes because there's no way to predict
which direction the Explorer will go. Okay, I think, fine, this is it, I'm toast.

My life doesn't pass befor
e my eyes like it's supposed to. I merely understand
that in a second or so I'm likely going to
be dead. There'll be the pain of impact,
the Ford Explorer stuck in my gullet, and a
mess of Chinese food splattered all over me like
puke in a parking lot.

But there's no impact, and when I open my
eyes I catch a glimpse of a frightened man's face
whizzing past, and I see the Explorer straighten itself on
the road — only backward. In the rear
-view mirror I watch it brake, spin a second
one-eighty, and skid to a stop.

I don't stop to console the driver
. I'd like to do it with a tire
iron, but I've got — and suddenly I'm recalling
that Robert Frost poem Esther likes — miles to go
before I sleep. Even if I didn't, it isn't
a good idea to stop a car on Cranberry Ridge to recite poetry.