The Last of the Lumbermen (5 page)

FIVE

T
HE COLISEUM IS USED
pretty well around the
clock on weekends, so Esther and I wander out
to the stands to watch the
minor hockey game
that's on the ice. It's just past noon and the
Peewees are playing, eleven- and twelve-year-olds. At this
age, they can be fun to watch. They're
fast and the no-hitting rules let their budding skills
shine. They're not overdosed with hormones like
they will be in a couple of years, so they
don't miss the hitting, and they don't give a
damn about fighting.

That's where the good stuf
f ends. Up in the stands, these kids have
parents
, and modern hockey parents are a separate
species from the rest of us, one that gives
up all traces of civilization the moment it opens an a
rena dressing room and pushes its offspring inside.
I grew up before the kind of minor
hockey played today was invented, so I can tell you
what a great game hockey used to be. All you
needed was a stick, a puck, weather cold enough to
freeze a patch of ice, and some other kids.
You could play for hours without seeing hide nor hair
of your parents — or any other screaming adults
— and you came home with a runny nose,
not a bloody one. But somewhere along the line, somebody
decided that it wasn't safe for children to play hockey without adults there to bullyrag them, and things went straight to Looneyville.

Esther has the right word for the people who
did it. She calls them “Close Adults” — as in
Close
Adult Supervision.
I don't think they're adults at all.
They were invented by those job-sucking social workers who think
the world would be better if everyone is strapped into
safety devices or covered up to the ears with
regulations. Close Adults believe there's a child
molester hiding behind every clump of bushes, and a safety haza
rd everywhere else. You can tell the diffe
rence between them and the social workers who invented them
because they're willing to ruin children's fun without
being paid to do it. That's what they've done to
minor hockey.

So let me correct myself. It isn't
the game that's the problem. Minor hockey could be fun
if they'd just kick the adults off the benches
and out of the offices, and put the parents
in straitjackets and stuff gags in their mouths while their
kids are on the ice — and maybe for an hour or two afterward.

The pa
rents in the stands this morning are jumping up
and down and hollering at the referee, the coaches,
and the opposition players as if they believe
the fate of the world rests on how this mid-season
game goes. They think that the big investment they've made on
their kid's equipment entitles them to lose their minds over
the slightest error, injustice, wavering will, or lapse in
concentration on the part of anyone on or near the
ice — the players, coaches, officials, — it doesn't seem
to matter which. You might mistake these crazies for normally
overprotective parents if you didn't see them sc
reaming at their kids to play harder, smarten
up, and kill every other parents' kid who keeps them f
rom looking like the next Bobby Orr or Wayne Gretzky.

As Esther and I settle down
into the seats, a two-hundredpound mother in a pink
parka and blue ski pants is clambering across the
seats to yell from rinkside at her son, who
has just been trapped up-ice on a breakaway.

“Skate, you little shithead!” she
shrieks at his backside as he lopes up the ice after the play, hopelessly behind. The boy hears her, hesitates momentarily, and drifts
sideways along his own blueline as the breakaway fails and
the puck skitters back toward centre.

“Get on the
puck!” the mother bellows, louder if possible, waving her arms
like a windmill. “Move it, you lazy asshole! Move!”

Other par
ents farther up in the stands get caught up in
her hysteria and add to the din, terrified that
their sons will humiliate them the way this woman's son has.
The boy glances toward the commotion, and, hesitating again,
skates into a player from his own team who is
rushing after the action. They both go down in a
heap. A player from the other team retrieves
the puck and pushes it ahead to his winger, who
skates in on the net and scores easily.

I
see the coach yanking at his necktie and muttering to
himself as the teams line up for the face-off
at centre. But as the puck is dropped, he
turns toward the mother and makes a resigned
“calm down” signal to her.

“That's nice,” Esther says. “At least he's leaving
the boy on the ice.”

“He probably realizes it's the
only place the poor little bugger will be safe from that Zeppelin.”

Except that the
coach is mistaken. The boy isn't safe. His mother waddles
toward a spot near the bench, lifts one foot onto
the top of the boards, and levers herself onto
the glass so that nearly half her torso is
looming over the ice. When her son picks up the puck
behind the net and skates toward her along the
boards, she leans over and takes a swing at
him. He sees it coming, ducks, and a boy from
the other team who's trying to check him from
behind takes a thick forearm smash flush on his
face-cage and crumples to the ice.

The parents from the other team,
who are sitting on the other side of the rink
— part of an unwritten rule that keeps opposing pa
rents away from one another — get to their feet as one and
begin leaping over the seats to get at their kid's assailant.

“Let's get out of here,” Esther says. “I've seen
this too many times before.”

By the time we get up
to the rotunda level the parents from both
teams are flailing away at one another in the
stands while the kids mill around aimlessly down on
the ice, wondering if they'll get to finish a game that
they alone seem to understand is supposed to be fun.

WENDEL PULLS
UP IN
my car as we reach the arena's
front entrance. He sees us, and just to
piss me off he floors it and jerks the
wheel hard so the rear end spins around,
spattering filthy snow and gravel across the just-cleaned plate
glass that protects Esther and me. Then, as we watch,
he pushes open the car door and leaps out in
one motion, as if to tease me with his agility
. Esther thinks he's funny, as always, and she's laughing
out loud as he pushes the arena doors open, sticks his head in, and tosses my keys at me.

“Screw you, Weave
r,” he says, and is gone.

I'M FOND OF MY
car. It's a five-year
-old Lincoln Town Car, a fourdoor jet
black number with leather seats, the only one in town.
I got it in an auction three years ago f
rom the City, which was conducting one
of its phony austerity drives prior to the civic elections. Mantua's
long-time mayor, Garvin Snell, extracts one of these cars
from the city budget every two years, with the
degree of slashing and chopping depending on how popular the
candidate stupid enough to make an election run at him
happens to be. Snell sobers himself up for a few
months before elections, announces an austerity program,
kisses a few babies, pulls a crowd-pleasing stunt like selling
off the nearly new City limousine, and gets himself
reelected. Nobody seems to care that the manoeuv
re always ends up costing the city more money than it saves, or that it enables Snell
to run the city in his customary alcoholic daze for another term.

Since I'm the beneficiary of one
of his stunts — I picked up the Lincoln for
eight grand — I guess I shouldn't complain. It's just that
the way people let themselves be suckered and deceived
around here drives me crazy. If it
isn't one thing it's another, and it's been going on
since Alexander Mackenzie first came down the river and started
screwing the native people out of their birthright.

You think I'm kidding about this? Let me tell you a few stories.

Back
in the mid-1950s, a Swedish millionaire
announced that he was going to build a monorail from
here to Vancouver. The government promptly p
romised him timber rights all over the area along
with the rights of way along his proposed route.
A stampede was soon underway, with speculators — local
ones included — buying up useless land and flipping it,
and everyone generally overdosing on their own greedy ad
renaline. Then, big surprise, nothing happened. Eventually a stretch
of monorail was built in Seattle for the 1962
World's Fair, but when it proved to be
expensive to build, dead slow, and unreliable, the
lights still didn't go on. Anyone with an ounce of common
sense could have figured out that monorails were
too rinky-dink for hauling sawlogs, but so long as the r
eal estate prices kept climbing no- body here had
the common sense of a beagle. Anything connected to
the real world was labeled “negativity,” and negativity
was treated as a form of communism.

In the '60s it got worse. The
re was the hydroelectric craze, and the same bunch
of clowns who boostered the monorail got busy touting the
government's plan to dam up the Peace River a couple
hundred miles north of town. The government was in
so much of a hurry divvying up fat contracts to their
political allies that they didn't bother to log the valley
floor or clear out the animals. When the lake was filled
it drowned five thousand moose, and by the time
they'd finished pulling out the carcasses and burning them it was time for the t
rees to start rocketing up from the lake bottom and killing boaters. Fifteen years later they were still hauling dead
trees out of the water and burning them —
a million board feet a day, I heard.
The Americans got cheap power, and the government got
a whopping project cost overrun we've been paying
interest on ever since. The Indians got flown-in booze, junk
food, and welfare cheques to live on instead
of the fresh valley air and moose they'd begun with.

Mantua did
get cheaper industrial power rates, it's true. That netted
us multinational-owned pulp harvesters and supermills to slag the
forests more efficiently than our own people could.
More than five hundred of the six hundr
ed small, locally owned mills Mantua started with closed down over
the next ten years. The multinationals stunk up the valley
with sulphur, polluted the rivers, tossed the mill-workers
and most of the loggers out of their jobs, and
shipped out the product and the profits. The
eight-hundred-kilometre-long lake the power dams created, meanwhile,
screwed up the ecology of the entire W
estern Subarctic. The weather patterns to the south changed too,
with fog banks rolling down the Rocky Mountain Trench
to carry the pulpmill stench right into our beautiful
downtown. It did put an end to the minus-fifty winters, but
we'll probably pay for that in some horrible way too, eventually.

And
listen, those are just
some
of the delusions. Y
ou ought to hear Wendel on the subject of how
they're handling forestry today. He makes me sound like I'm the publicity agent for the Chamber of Commerce.

SIX

I
EASE MYSELF BEHIND
the wheel of the Lincoln, crank it
up, and wait while Esther uses the rear-view
to touch up her makeup.
She knows I don't like
her using the rear-view for that but she
does it anyway, never mind that there's a
mirror on the back of the passenger side visor, lighted.

This morning I watch her without a trace of irritation.
In fact, today I'm finding it — and her —
pretty fabulous. Her vanity isn't the same as a gu
y, say, combing his hair. Esther's vanity
isn't tied up in her ego. Or if it is,
it isn't going to start any wars or ignore what's
around it. I can't say if it's essentially female,
but it's Esther Simons.

I didn't always feel this way about
her. The first time around, I wasn't capable
of seeing much of anything in her except the opportunity to
get laid. I don't think Esther had much of an
essence yet, actually. Even now, her essence is
the kind that sort of sneaks up on you. When I
came back here seven years ago, it took mor
e than a year for me to realize how terrific
she is, even though she was right under my
nose. And it wasn't until I saw her with her
clothes off and saw the freckles that I
realized she was the concession girl I slept with all those years before.

She was hanging around with Gord when our
second go-round began, although I'm pretty sure she
wasn't sleeping with him. They were friends, and she
was still — not officially but in her own mind —
mourning the death of her husband, Leo. According to
what Gord told me about Leo Simons, he was
a good husband and father, and a successful logging contractor
until the day he decided to show one of his
fallers how to clean up a big spruce the faller
had dropped between two others. Leo got the chainsaw
into one of the standing trees, and the vibrations
loosened the hung-up tree, which slid along the trunk
of the tree he was cutting. You can imagine the
rest.

Leo left Esther comfortable enough financially. The house
was paid for — the one she and I live
in now — and she owns several lar
ge chunks of industrial land next to one of the
pulp mills. One of them is the parcel Wendel
uses to carry on his greenhouse ventures.

Esther doesn't
need to work, and she generally takes the summers
off unless a client is having really serious difficulties.
I don't know for sure, but I think
she and Jack tinker around with stocks and bonds the
same way he and I do. I steer clear of
that part of her life, she keeps her nose out
of my business, and we both like it that way.

Like I said, it
wasn't until I got her clothes off and saw
the freckles that I realized who she was. I
mean, really. There couldn't be another set
of freckles like that anywhere. Blurting out that
I'd already slept with her didn't seem like the
sort of thing that would deepen the experience, so I kept
my mouth shut. And since there was nothing I
did (in bed or otherwise) that gave me away as the
boy she'd had a late-night drunken grope with,
she was none the wiser. I didn't seem to
have made much of an impression on Esther while I
was Billy Menzies anyway. Within a year or
so she'd married Leo Simons and was pregnant with Wendel.

Trouble is, not telling her
who I was saddled me with a permanently delicate problem. There doesn't seem to be any civilized way I can tell her much of
anything about my past, either the part of it she'd been
in or the rest of it. I don't want
anyone to recognize me as an older Billy Menzies. Partly
that's because I'm somebody else now, and I want to
be judged as Andy Bathgate. But there's the practical
side to it. I'm pretty sure there's
there's still a warrant out for my arrest.

“
ANDY,” SHE
SAYS. “WAKE
up. You're making me think
I should have taken you to the hospital last night.”

“Why?”

“You've been acting like a zombie all morning.”

“I've got some things on my mind, that's all. It's nothing.”

“Like what have you got on your mind?”

“I dunno. Like why Wendel dislikes me, maybe.”

“That's no big
mystery,” she says. “You're sleeping with his mothe
r. It's an instinct. I've explained the Oedipus Complex to
you. Stop taking it personally.”

“Well, I do.”

“Well, don't. Grow up. And
if you really wanted to get along with Wendel, you could try harder yourself.”

“What
do you mean, ‘try harder'? I do tr
y. I just let him drive my car, didn't I?”

“Ooh, my,”
she answers, her voice dripping with sarcasm, “How gener
ous of you. Why don't you start listening to what
he says, instead of teasing him all the time. He'd like
you better if you acted as a parent instead of a competitor.”

“I'm not his parent,” I say, “and he doesn't want me to be.”

The
moment it's out of my mouth I regret having
said it. Esther's eyes flash, and she crosses
her arms. “Let's get going,” she says, her voice suddenly tight and hard. “We've got errands to do.”

IN LATE JANUARY MANTUA
doesn't remind
anyone of April in Paris: mall parking lots filled with mud-splatte
red pickup trucks and the discarded furniture
and green garbage bags people kick off the
backs of those pickups late at night, after the City's
privatized trucks don't pick it up in front
of their houses. Huge, dirty snowbanks line the streets, riddled
with winter debris — road sand, discarded milk cartons,
cigarette packages, candy bar wrappers, more green garbage bags.

These days, the
re's a new kind of debris on the streets:
surplus human beings. They're unemployed loggers, most of them.
They hang around waiting for the industry to go back
into a boom, which it does regularly, but without
hiring anyone back who got boosted out in the last
downturn. The loggers hang around town drinking off their
unemployment insurance cheques and, when those run out, their welfa
re cheques. They aren't street people like you
see in bigger cities to the south, but that's because
anyone who tries to camp out in these streets will
wind up as a human popsicle.

This kind of poverty makes
people struggle and straggle on, selling off the
RVs and Ski-Doos they bought during the gravy years, then
their second cars, and, finally, their houses. Eventually most of
the families break up, and the women and kids
move elsewhere, usually south to Vancouver or
the Okanagan Valley. Or, for the women whose
husbands go crazy before they're dead broke and beaten, into shelters.

The men don't get off much easier. They
end up living hand to mouth in the low-end hotels and
rooming houses, lurching from drunken brawl to
hangover and back to the bar, sucking up every
omen that the old days are coming back. I
don't know what to do about it, and neither does anyone else.

What I do know is
that the answer the politicians keep coming up with — mo
re logging — isn't an answer at all. If what
Wendel and his cronies have been saying is halfway
true there aren't enough trees left to continue at the present cutting rates, let alone
enlarge the cut. Gord told
me once that civilization is a place where people don't
lie to one another in order to stay alive.
If he's right, this isn't civilization anymore.

Once you get a few miles
out of town — if you steer away from the
huge clearcuts — this is the most beautiful landscape
in the country. It's what brought me back
here and now keeps me here — aside f
rom Esther, of course. I mean, the climate isn't
Hawaii, but there are compensations. Hawaii? I spent
a week there once, and don't take me back, ever
again. It's nothing but a giant outdoor hot tub
lined with souvenir shops and wall-to-wall assholes. They don't play much hockey there, either.

ESTHER
GIVES ME THE
silent treatment while we do the
grocery shopping. Eventually it sinks into my thick skull
that I've seriously pissed her off, and I
begin casting around for some way to get myself
off the hook. It isn't easy to come up
with anything. The truth is that I need her mo
re than she needs me. I can't, as a matter
of fact, see a single thing about me she absolutely
has to have. I know she enjoys my company — most
of the time — and I guess I make her
laugh more than most men could. But I'm just
a guy, and Mantua is full of guys. And today I haven't made her laugh at all.

Aside from the gr
ocery shopping, for instance, our errands are all mine. I've
got to go to Northern Sports to pick up a
pair of hockey gloves they've put new palms into, and
I need another half-dozen sticks — broke two on Friday
night, so I've only got two left. Gord keeps
trying to convert me to the new carbon sticks, but I've
been hung up on Sher-Wood pmp 5
030s since they started making them. The trouble
is, I shave the shafts so thin they break all
the time, and each one requires about twenty
minutes of surgery before they're usable.

When we get to
Northern Sports, Wally, the owner, informs me
that the shipment of sticks hasn't come in, and he only has two left-side 5030s left, one of them with too much curve on the blade.

I'm a little cheezed off. “Jesus, Wally,” I
whine. “I told you I'd need more sticks thr
ee weeks ago. We've got a game with the Roosters
tomorrow afternoon. You know you can't safely go into
a game with those clowns with just two sticks.”

“What I am supposed to do?” he hoots. “Mug
a bunch of Old Age Pensioners and take theirs? You'
re lucky the factory is still producing these antiques.
And anyway, what do you care about safe? Y
ou're just cheap. If you were really inte
rested in safety you'd buy a proper helmet, and
start using modern sticks. And you'd talk No Neck into wearing a helmet.”

“You know damned well
they don't make helmets big enough to fit his head,” I
answer, ignoring his crack about me being cheap. “And
don't call Gord ‘No Neck,' or I'll bring him
in here and let him stuff your head down
your neck and pull it out through your asshole like he keeps thr
eatening to.”

“Oh pulleeese, not again,” Wally pleads, and then becomes serious.
“Do you want me to phone around and see
if anyone has 5030s?”

“Don't suckhole,” I say.
“I can always get them at Canadian Tire. I just shop here because I like you.”

W
e drive over to Canadian Tire and pick up
six 5030s — all they have. I'd pr
efer not to buy anything from the franchises, because I
hate the idea that all the profits leave Mantua
— I'd rather give up my bucks to a local
business, even if it costs more and it's a smartass
like Wally I'm paying. Besides, I've never seen a
franchise in my life that gave a crap about
service. They're there to merchandise products,
and if they don't have what you want, then screw you. It's one of the few things Wendel and I ag
ree on.

Esther gets out of the car when I do,
but she doesn't come into Canadian Tire with me.
As I'm about to enter, she veers off
with out a word and whips out her cell.
The moment she leaves the car, I get it: I've
forgotten to cancel the physio appointment, and she's doing it for me. See what I mean about who needs who?