The Last of the Lumbermen (4 page)

I'VE PLAYED ON A
couple of
Senior teams in my time that could have made pureed
banana out of a lot of Junior A teams, and
who on a good night might have given an NHL
team a run. The Chilliwack Christian Lions, despite the goofy
name, were one of the best. It wasn't religion
that made us good, and it wasn't the coaching. We
were all under twenty-five, and most of us had
good skills. We hung out together outside of hockey,
and we liked one another, and, despite the pious
stage we were on, we spent a lot of time getting d
runk together.

These days, most Senior leagues are filled
with washouts from Juniors mixed in with a few older
guys like me. The best players are what I
call homers: local players who make their game — and the
other parts of their lives — out of character and,
more often than you'd think, brains. I've played with
lots of guys in their thirties and early forties who a
re better players than they were at twenty.
Sure, the legs may have died, and the grand
ambitions are gone, but the love of the game is
still there, trimmed down to a scale that fits.
In a time when everyone and everything is trying to r
emake the world with levered debt, World Class p
retense, and over-scale self-esteem, how many people do you
know who can walk across the street in synch
with their surroundings, and without wishing they were
somewhere else? Well, Senior hockey has ‘em. Not many, but enough.

Take Gor
d, for a perfect example. He's six-one and close to
two hundred and sixty pounds. If you spotted him and
his nineteeninch neck on the street or in
a bar, you'd swear he was a no-good down-and-dirty middle-aged
trucker. The truth is that he needs
that nineteen-inch neck to support his brain, which is big
enough that he can't get a hockey helmet to fit a
round his skull. So what if he can't wheel because
of an old back injury, can't turn to the
left because the outside ligaments on his left knee are
flapping with loose cartilage? So what if he's closer to
fifty than to forty? You never hear him whining about
what he could have been, because he doesn't want to be
anywhere but exactly where he is. He's a medical doctor, not a truck driver, so
he has real smarts. In fact, he's the district coroner.

Maybe, come
to think of it, that's why he's always talking about
time. He sees what's at the business end of it
more times a week than most people do in a
lifetime. Hell, he's probably seen a dozen people who've been run over by r
eal freight trains.

Jack Lankin, my right winger, is another example.
Jack's about my age, but he has even more
damaged cartilage in his knees than Gord. Otherwise, he's Go
rd's opposite: five-seven, maybe one hundred and sixty
pounds, and his neck wouldn't look out of place in
a chicken coop. Gord calls Jack the flabmeister because
he's never worked out a day in his life and lives
on a diet of cheeseburgers and light beer.
But he's got softer hands than I have, he's surpris
ingly quick, and he's a magician when he gets close to the net.

Jack's my tax accountant, and he's a magician at
that too. He's also as gloomy as Gord is calm
and cheerful. With the local economy what it is, sorting
out people's finances, I guess, is more depressing than dealing with people's cadavers.

Oh
yeah. Jack's also the general manager and playing coach of
the Mantua Mohawks, and pretty much the man who
keeps the North Central B.C. Senior Hockey League going. When Esther
and I enter the dressing room, he and Gord are just sitting down to solve the league's latest crisis.

FOUR

E
STHER COMES INTO THE
dressing room with me this
morning just like she did last night to rescue
me. She was wandering in
and out of Mantua's
hockey dressing rooms long before I became
her main squeeze, so nobody thinks twice about it. She
did it with Wendel before he went o
ff to Regina to play Junior A, and I
suspect she did it while her husband was playing. I'm
pretty sure that if Wendel had decided
to sign with the Rangers she'd be wandering in
and out of
NHL
dressing rooms without anyone
stopping her, too.

Having her around makes a certain subtle
dress code necessary after games, along with a
degree of verbal decorum, and I've got to
admit I welcome both. I never did like the d
ressing room horseshit as much as most of the guys
I've played with, not the rah-rah stuff and not the nastier stuff.

“So,” I ask
as I shed my coat and edge myself onto the
leatherette training table. “What's today's doom and gloom?”

Jack and Gord are crammed into
Jack's cubby hole of an office. Jack's behind the desk,
Gord straddling one of the two rickety chairs. It isn't
quite a confidential conversation we're busting in on, but
then it really isn't an office they're in, eithe
r. There's no door, just the big oak general manager's desk Jack got in a furniture auction, a telephone, and the equipment lockup behind the
desk. Jack has his elbows on the surface of the
desk, hands over his ears. He doesn't look happy.

“It's the Roosters,” Gord answers for
him. “They don't want to play Sunday afternoon.”

“What is it this time?” Esther asks.

With the Roosters, it's
always something. They're from Came- lot, the
town one hundred klicks south of Mantua, and they'r
e perpetually short of players. The reason is that the
team is owned and run by Fritz Ratsloff, and
he has seven of his own sons on the team, along
with three or four of their cousins. You'd
think having it all in the family would make it easie
r, but the Ratsloffs have their own unique style
of hockey, and they expect anyone they bring in to
play from outside the family to play their wa
y. A Ratsloff is hard to emulate, and
months go by when they only have the eleven Ratsloffs
and their little goalie, Lenny Nakamoto. Lenny runs the old
man's hotel bar for him and doesn't mind the way
they play because he's wackier than any of them. He's
a black belt karate expert, and the only goalie I've ever
seen who can deliver a rabbit punch with a hockey
blocker that can lay a man out cold. Not a
lot of forwards care to crowd his crease.

Try to imagine a hockey
team made up of eleven Hanson brothers and Br
uce Lee, and you've got the Roosters. The Ratsloffs
are all stark raving crazy, each, all,
and in their own unique ways — except for the twins,
who are crazy in the
same
way. When
things get going, all of them are as likely
to crunch a member of their own team they suspect
of malingering as players on the opposing team. I can't
remember when we last beat them, and it isn't because
they've got better hockey skills. Excepting Gord, who they can't
do much damage to, and Wendel, who's so fast they
can't catch him, I think most of us let them
win because we're afraid of what they'll do to us if we beat them.

They leave me alone too, sort
of. Can't say exactly why, but I've been excused from the serious bone-crunching ever since I
started playing in the league. I have
a theory about why. Some- one, probably Jack,
told them I'm the real Andy Bathgate, the one who
played in the nhl back in the '50s
and '60s. Only the Ratsloffs would be thick-headed
enough not to realize I can't be the real
Andy Bathgate. Or even if I were, I don't
see why it would matter to them. But there it
is. They give me a patch of ice free
of blood and broken bones, and I take it.

“The twins got D & D'd last
night after they beat the Bears up in Okenoke,”
Jack explains. “I guess they went to the bar,
bit the heads off a dozen or so weasels, and
then tried to bite the heads off a couple
of the Bears who were goofy enough to think
they could drink in the same bar. The cops've got
‘em in the lockup, and won't let them out.”

The twins are the youngest
Ratsloffs, the babies of the family. Some babies.
They're both six-foot-four, and nasty as wolverine snot. They'
re also dumb as wolverine snot. Jack's theory about
the twins is that the angel in charge of
brains didn't realize there were two of them
in the tank and only tossed one in, which they damaged by squabbling over which one got to use it.

“I don't see why they can't play,” Esther says.
“That's only two players out.”

“You're forgetting that you'r
e dealing with the Ratsloffs,” I say. “Not human
beings. The rest of them won't leave Okenoke without the twins.”

“I
heard they spent all night driving their 4x4s
up and down the street trying to run the
locals down.” Jack adds. “The
RCMP
detachment's thinking of
declaring a state of emergency — or siege or whatever — but they're not sur
e how to do it.”

“If they don't figure it out pretty quick,”
Gord says, “the bar's going to open and the Ratsloffs will really lose their minds.”

“Well,
what those animals do isn't your problem,” Esther sni
ffs. “Let them default the game if they don't show up.”

“Maybe we should send Andy up there to
see if he can calm them down,” Gord says. “They never behave like animals around him.”

That gets a laugh from everyone but Esther,
who pulls me down on the table and nudges me to
turn over on my stomach. “You're not going
anywhere,” she announces. “Pull off your shirt and
I'll see if I can get your back moving. Maybe
I won't have to take you to the physiotherapist this afternoon.”

I roll over onto my gut
and instantly feel her strong fingers pushing at the snarly discs at the base of my spine.

MORE FA
CTS FOR YOU
: the North Central British Columbia Senior
Hockey League, known for short as the
NSHL
, has
four teams: the Mantua Mohawks, the Roosters, the Okenoke Bears
from the town just north of Mantua, and
the Wilson Lake Stingers, the southernmost team. Over the
years a few teams from farther away have
joined the league, but sooner or later they pack it
in. When I joined the league there were
six teams, actually, but that only lasted the
first year. It's been down to the basic quartet
for the last four now.

It's really common sense
that dictates the size of this league. Most players drive their
own cars to the away games, and it better not
take too long, because it's a league tradition for the players
to load up on the way. With a
three- or four-hour drive, sooner or later you're
going to land up with an impaired driving char
ge, or in some ditch as a quad, or dead.
Even when those distant teams made it to a game
intact, it wasn't much fun watching the home team pound on a bunch of tired-out drunks.

Like I said,
I'm in my seventh season with the Mohawks, all with
the same linemates and most of the same players as
when I started. Around the league they call us the
Molasses Line, for reasons I don't need to
go into. Still, we do our share of scoring,
and we play smart. I don't think our defencemen are
too fond of us, but, well, you know the answer to that one.

My nickname is
Weaver.
I can't remember who hung it on me, or exactly
why. I picked it up in my twenties, and it stuck. People around here probably think
it has something to do with the way I wander a
round an offensive zone, looking for open space —
and trying to avoid contact with opposing defencemen. So I'm okay
with it. I put things together. I suppose you
could say that's what I do outside the rink, too,
but slipping and sliding is a more common talent for people in real estate.

I'm
a rangy six-two, one-eighty, and with a thick head
of white hair I wear down to my shoulders. I guess
I look pretty strange coming in on a defenceman.
Outside of Wendel, I'm about the league's biggest draw.
Who knows, maybe it's the Andy Bathgate thing. If the Ratslo
ffs will buy into that one, who's to say others
haven't? The real Andy Bathgate is older than I am,
even if the kid in the stands last night won't believe that's possible.

RIGHT NOW, WITH ESTHER'S
knuckle jammed into my left gluteus muscle, I'm having
no luck at all trying to pretend my back doesn't
hurt. It's excruciating, until her thumb connects with the
spasming nerve and the needle goes off the register
and I let out a howl in spite of myself.

Esther doesn't let up. She's
done this enough times to know what'll happen next. The
nerve connection overloads and severs, and I feel the muscles all
across my back and down my left leg let
go. Sensing it, she relaxes her thumb, and slaps my thigh.

“Congratulations,” she says. “You've just given birth to
one five-hundredth of the real thing.”

Jack looks up from his desk. “What did you say?”

“Nothing,” I answer. “She's
just reminding me that only women know what pain is about.”

He ignores me.
“Oh. So you're saying Weaver will be able to play tomorrow afternoon.”

Esther grimaces. “If he wants to.”

“You're off the hook for practice today, anyway.” Gord says.

“How come?” I ask.

“Nobody wanted one,” Jack explains. “So we let the Juniors have the slot.”

Now you know why we're in last place.