Indian Horse (15 page)

Soon after those stories appeared, we started to see a stranger in the stands. He was a tall, thin white guy in a battered hat and a long grey trench coat. Wearing those pullover rubbers with the zippers you never see in the North. He showed up at a tourney in Osnaburgh, and then at one in Pickle Lake. He was in the stands during the big tournament in Batchewana, and as we clomped back into our dressing room after winning the semifinal, the word “scout” was whispered along the line. I sat down on the bench with a towel draped around my neck and everybody looking at me. Big brown faces. Deep dark eyes. Indian faces, all stoic and quiet, studying me with a focus that rattled me some.

“What?” I asked.

“He’s here for you, Saul,” Ernie Jack said quietly.

“Who is?”

“The scout.”

“Nobody knows if he’s a scout or not.”

There was a knock at the door, and Virgil walked over and opened it. The white guy stood there with his hands thrust deep in the pockets of his coat. He and Virgil talked in low voices for a moment or two. There wasn’t a sound in that room. No one moved to undress. I could see the man scanning the room, and when his eyes fell on me he squinted. Then he patted Virgil on the shoulder and Virgil closed the door. He crossed the room and sat down beside me. You could have heard a pin drop in that room.

“Guy’s name is Jack Lanahan. He’s a scout for the Leafs,” Virgil said. “Says he’d like to talk to you.”

“About what?”

Virgil laughed and slapped my knee pad. “What the hell does a big scout like that talk about, Saul? He thinks you could play in the NHL.”

“I’ve never been out of the North.”

“Well, maybe this is your ticket out.”

“Never thought about going anywhere.”

“That’s because you never been scouted before. Talk to him.”

34

I found Lanahan
sitting in the stands reading a sports magazine. His raised eyebrows pushed down on his nose and the little glasses made him look like he was surprised at what he was reading. He folded the magazine when I approached and stuffed it into his pocket. He stood up and shook my hand.

“Jack Lanahan, Saul. Nice to meet you.”

“Same.”

“Your captain told you what I’m doing here?”

“Some.”

“What do you think about that?”

“Not much.”

He laughed and sat down and motioned for me to join him. I sat a few seats away. “That rush in the third period? You had the puck for forty-eight seconds. You went end to end with it, dipsy-doodled around awhile, then made that pass behind your back to your left defenseman scooting in from the blue line. How’d you know he was coming?”

Lanahan took of his glasses and folded the arms carefully and slipped them into the inside pocket of his coat. He crossed one leg over the other and folded his hands in his lap. When he caught me studying him he just grinned and threw an arm across the back of the seat beside him. Patient. Calm. Didn’t rattle.

“It’s where he was supposed to go,” I said.

“What if he hadn’t?”

I looked at him and shrugged. “He did,” I said.

Lanahan laughed again, and I could hear the echo in the empty arena. “Yes, he did. But why wait to pass? You could have made a shot.”

“It’s a team game,” I said.

“Didn’t look like that for the first forty-eight seconds.”

“Time stops when the puck is in the net.”

He kicked the back of the seat in front of him. “It does, doesn’t it? Saul, I think you could play at a higher level. I think with the right coaching and the right environment you could play pro. You’re incredibly fast. You have a puck sense I’ve never seen before and you can take a hit despite your size. What would you say to that?”

“To what part?”

“The pro part.”

“I never thought about it.”

“Well, think about it now, because I could get you a tryout with the Toronto Marlboros. They’re Major Junior A. The feeder club for the Maple Leafs.”

“We’ve tried higher levels. It sucks.”

“The Marlies aren’t Espanola, Saul.”

He looked at me evenly. He’d obviously done his research and I looked past him to the ice. He waited me out. I leaned forward in my seat. “White ice, white players,” I said. “You gonna tell me that isn’t the case everywhere? That they don’t think it’s their game wherever a guy goes?”

He took his time answering. “It’s not a perfect country,” he said. “But it is a perfect game.”

“Is it?”

“Yes. That’s why you play.”

“How do you know that?”

“I’ve been scouting for a long time, Saul. I could never play the game. I didn’t have the body for it. Bad eyes, bad genes, no stick, no shot. But I love it. God. So I head out on the road every winter and I go to hundreds of games in hundreds of dead-end little towns. The towns and the players are all different. But the game is always the same, its speed and power. Hockey’s grace and poetry make men beautiful. The thrill of it lifts people out of their seats.Dreams unfold right before your eyes, conjured by a stick and a puck on a hundred and eighty feet of ice. The players? The good ones? The great ones? They’re the ones who can harness that lightning. They’re the conjurers. They become one with the game and it lifts them up and out of their lives too. That’s what happens to you, isn’t it?”

I looked right into his eyes and he held the look. “Yes,” I said, finally. “It was like that right from the start.”

“And I can see that when you take the ice. I don’t think you see it like other players do, Saul. I think you see it from a different kind of plane. It takes a while for you to get to that. I’ve seen you sit back and watch, read the energy. You read the game and once you’ve got it, you jump in. Those blind passes? They aren’t so blind, are they?”

“No,” I said.

“You know how to make the ice work for you, Saul. That’s why you should be playing at a higher level. You’re wasted here.”

“I’ve never been anything other than a Moose.”

He turned in his seat to face me. “I know. But they’ve taken you as far as they can.”

“I can’t just leave.”

“Sure you can. And they would want you to.”

“How do you know that?

“Because they love the game too.”

35

It took them
three weeks to get to me. We went to the scheduled tournaments and we played well, but there was a new energy on the team, not just on the ice but on the bench and in the dressing room. Waiting. Expectant. I didn’t know what people wanted me to say, so I just played as usual. We were on our new team bus heading back from Pic River when four of them came to me. Virgil. Ernie Jack. Louis Greene. Little Chief. They huddled around my seat while I kept my face to the window.

“You gotta go, Saul,” Virgil said.

“Don’t want to,” I said.

“That don’t matter,” Little Chief said.

“Why?”

“Because you got called.”

“I don’t follow.” I stared out the window as the land peeled by, humped into spectral shapes by the moonless dark.

“We all play the game wishing that someday a call will come and someone will ask us to play with the big boys,” Little Chief said. “Nobody says nothing about that. It must seem stupid on accounta we’re just Moose, but we dream it anyhow.”

“So that means what to me?” I asked.

Ernie Jack leaned over so I could look at him. He was big, wide in the upper body, so he ate up a big chunk of the darkness. He punched me on the thigh. “It means you get out,” he said. “I’m twenty-three years old. I’m working graveyard in the fucking mine and I been there since I was sixteen. I’ll be there until it kills me or I’m too fucking old. I ain’t got no out. I don’t mind that. I got Emma and I got the kids and I got the Moose until I’m too damn old for that too. But someone reached down and put lightning bolts in your legs, Saul. Someone put thunder in your wrist shot and eyes in the back of your fucking head. You were made for this game. So you gotta give this a shot for all of us who’re never gonna get out of Manitouwadge.”

“What if I don’t make it?”

“You will,” Ernie said.

“You believe that?”

“I ain’t the one that has to believe it.”

I turned to look at the triangulated shadow of the trees thrown up into the sky. I just wanted to play the game. I didn’t want to have to make a choice.

“Something big’s gonna happen to you if you stay here, Saul.” It was Little Chief. I turned to look at him and all I could see was the outline of this head like a keg.

“What’s that?” I asked.

“Well, I’m gonna wake up ten, fifteen, years from now and I’m gonna clump on down to the rink to skate and I’m gonna see you making circles on the ice with the puck. I’m gonna see you like I always seen you. Like something fucking special. And I’m gonna walk over to those boards, fifteen years down the road, all stiff and sore from lugging lumber around all day and see you there and know that it all could have been different. That I mighta been able to live some of my dream out through you. But you’re still here. So the big thing that’s gonna happen to you? I’m gonna pull you over those boards and kick the shit right outta you for wasting it. For not answering the call.”

He thumped the back of the seat, and I could feel the emotion working in him. I looked at Virgil. “What do you think?”

“I think you owe me.”

“I owe you?”

“Yeah.”

“Owe you what?”

“You owe me the game.”

“How’s that?”

“I was the one who said okay, you skate with us. My dad got you out of that school and brought you up here. But it was me who said yes for the team. I coulda said you should play bantam or midget first. But I saw what you could do and I knew that you could make this team better. If you weren’t a Moose you’d be nowhere. No one woulda seen you, hearda you, known about you. There wouldn’t be a scout knocking on the dressing room door. So, yes, Saul, I gave you the game and you owe me.”

“And if I don’t go?”

“Then I’ll think you’re a coward. That you let it beat you without even trying.”

“What if I’m not good enough?”

He laughed, and the others laughed too. “You’re a shape-shifter, Saul. We all know that. The NHL never seen a shape-shifter before. Believe me, you’ll be good enough.”

“You sure of that?”

“Like he said, I ain’t the one that has to be.”

36

In the end
I played out the season and I agreed to go to the Marlboro training camp the next fall. I didn’t want the pressure of landing there midway through their season. I didn’t want to leave Manitouwadge just like that. I’d come to feel that the Moose, the Kellys and the town were mine. I went to school, I’d started working part-time at one of the mills, I was known wherever I went. I’d come to a place in the world that I could live in forever. Wanted to live in forever. I couldn’t leave before I was ready.

Making myself ready was hard, but Virgil stayed by my side. We ran the hills outside of town. We did wind sprints up and down those rugged slopes and he pushed me harder than I had ever been pushed before. He cut an eight-foot length of birch, made me put it across my shoulders and run uphill with it. He made me bound the talus boulders, like Father Leboutilier and I had done, only now I did it with a thirty-pound pack on my back. He fashioned a harness out of a broom handle and some rope and I used it to raise fifty-pound bags of cement off the floor by rolling my wrists. We went to the dump, where he set up rows of tires and had me jump back and forth between them with my feet tied together. When I got so I could do that easily, he made me do it faster. I took a lot of tumbles among the trash. Occasionally, he took me to the bush and I’d chop a tree down. It would take hours, the axe in my hands getting heavier and heavier as I bulled my way through it. Afterwards, we’d buck the length of it with a saw and carry the branches and detritus to a slash pile for burning. Then he made me carry the sawn rounds to the truck, where he’d watch while I split them for firewood with a thirty-pound maul. It was immensely tough work, but I got stronger. I got leaner. I felt powerful

When the time came to leave, he walked me to the bus. I said goodbye to Fred and Martha and the boys on the Moose, but it was Virgil who took me to the Greyhound station. Manitouwadge was quiet. It was late August. I was almost seventeen. I was as tall as I would ever be, but Virgil had managed to pack muscle onto every inch of me. My forearms bulged like Popeye’s and my thighs swelled against my pant legs. We didn’t say much to each other as we walked through town. The sun sent shimmers of late summer heat up off the pavement. Flies buzzed around our faces. Pine gum and sulfur bit at our noses.

“I’m gonna miss this place,” I said.

“Manitouwadge? Nothing to miss, really.”

“I feel like I grew up here.”

“Guess you did. You were a slack-bellied little pup when you got here.” He punched me on the shoulder. “You worked damn hard, Saul. You’ll do good down there.”

“They’ve billeted me with a white family.”

“Yeah. There’s not many Indians down there probably. I’ve never been there. Toronto. But I can’t imagine many skins really wanting to hang out in that big smoke and noise.”

He stopped to light a cigarette. He offered it to me and I took a long drag before returning it, though I rarely smoked. We sat on the set of steps outside the bus station and watched traffic eke by. “You’re like a brother to me. You know what I mean?”

“I had a brother once,” I said.

“What happened to him?”

“I never talk about it.”

He stubbed out his cigarette on the step. “My dad never talks about the school,” he said. “Mom neither. And they don’t say anything about what happened before that. Maybe someone just gave you a chance to rub the shit off the board once and for all.”

He looked at me. “I don’t know a whole lot about a whole lot of things. But if I know one thing for dead certain, Saul, it’s that hockey is what you were sent here to do.”

“What if I don’t make it down there?”

“Then you don’t make it, but at least you’ll have been out there rattling the cage.”

“Virgil? Thanks for everything.”