The Last of the Lumbermen (8 page)

Fred Menzies didn't see it the way I did. He sat me down the Sunday afternoon after the accident while my
mother was out at a church auxiliary.

“You know,” he said quietly
, “that your life here is over.”

Warily, I nodded agreement. “I
guess,” I answered. “What's going to happen?”

“If you're convicted, you'll
spend time in jail. And believe me, you'll be convicted.” He
began rummaging around in his jacket pocket, and stopped. “But that isn't what I mean.”

He looked
at me long and hard. I let the silence
hang between us without trying to excuse myself or apologize. I
had a lot of things coming to me, and this
lecture was the least of them. Fred had his
right to it — he'd bailed me out of jail,
and since then he'd somehow kept everyone away from me.

But the lecture didn't
start, and I found myself looking back at him the
way he was gazing at me. I really hadn't r
ealized that he gave a damn about me, but it was
there in his hard face — along with
the more easily recognized emotions. Finally, I couldn't
stand his pain any longer.

“So, what do you mean, Fred?” I asked.

His answer, after another long
silence, was a single question: “What's your name?”

“What are you asking?” I answered. “I'm Billy Menzies.”

“That isn't your
name from here on in,” he said with
a dark, simple patience in his voice. “As of right
now, your name is Andrew Bathgate.”

He slapped what he'd
been rummaging in his pockets for onto the table in
front of me. It was a folded sheet of
paper, and an envelope. I opened the piece of paper
first. It was my original birth certificate, and it named
me Andrew William Bathgate. In the envelope was two thousand dollars in hundreds and fifties.

I looked up into Fred's face for the explanation.

“I want you out of here,” he said, “before your mother comes back.”

NINE

G
ORD PUSHES HIS WAY
into the dressing room
carrying three huge bundles of freshly dry-cleaned
uniforms. He drops one into my lap.

“Christ, Weaver,”
he says, leaving the uniforms atop me and moving away to
slam open the metal door to his locker. “
You looked so peaceful there I was tempted to
put the tubes in and drain you.”

Aside from being my
closest friend, and the district coroner, Gord is
a trained mortician. He stopped practising long before I
knew him, but the mortician's sense of humour has stayed
with him. I've seen him and Jack put perfectly sober people
on the floor laughing with their Undertaker routine from
the
WWF
, and he and I have a running
joke about what morticians do with the gold teeth from cadavers.

Gor
d got tired, as he puts it, of the
makeup business, and went to medical school. But there's a
part of him that doesn't forget what he's seen
and done, and he doesn't give up trade secrets, even to his close friends.

And there are secrets, you know.
Ever heard of anyone who's asked what becomes of
the gold from their loved one's teeth after cremation?
Well, neither have I, but the gold must be going somewhere. I figure there's
a lucrative underground trade in cada- ver gold
that goes on between morticians and dental mechanics, but I'll be
damned if I can get Gord to confirm it.
He just laughs at me, and claims the gold is vapourized by the heat.

“I don't think I'm quite
ready for what you have in mind,” I laugh, pushing
the bundle off me and onto the floor without
sitting up. “Where have you been all afternoon?”

He sighs. “Some kid drove his car
off the road about forty kilometres
south last night. No one knew they were missing
until his girlfriend crawled back up to the road this morning.

“Dead?”

“Yeah,” he says. “You don't want to know about it.”

“What about the girl?”

“She'll be okay,” he answers, then adds, “someday.”

“How old was the kid?”

“About
Wendel's age. But not very much like Wendel.”

“No one is.” I'm momentarily grateful for Wendel's
virtues, one of which is the kind of common sense
that most males around here don't have until they're in their mid-thirties. If ever.

“I
feel sorry for most of them,” Gord says. “They'r
e just smart enough to see they've got no future.
Their parents weren't any smarter, but at
least they had a shot at making a decent living. These kids a
re…”

He falls silent, then shifts up a gear.

“The Juniors are coming off the
ice in few minutes,” he says. “Why don't we suit
up and burn off some lactic acid. Toss the
puck around a little.”

A glance at my wrist watch tells me I've
got a little over an hour before I'm supposed to be home. Why not?

THE JUNIORS COME
FLOODING
into the far end of the dressing
room as we're lacing up our skates. They'r
e pushing and shoving one another, high as kites on the combo of testosterone and adrenaline kids run on at that age. It makes me
wonder, as I tramp the runway to the ice
behind Gord's massive back and thick neck, what guys like us are using for fuel. It ain't testoster
one anymore.

But the moment we step on the ice, I
remember why I'm still playing. Then I take my second
step, on the left leg. A jolt runs up
it into my spine, and I forget. The first
turn around the ice, that's how it goes: remember, for
get, remember, forget, remember, forget.

By the time
we've circled the rink ten or fifteen times my
left lumbar has loosened, and there are several
more things I remember: the sound of
steel against ice, the peculiar colour and crispness of the air
over a hockey rink, the here and now of
hockey, with everything else at bay in the world
outside. There's a zone of quiet inside me that matches it.

Gord bangs
his stick on the ice and a puck whistles by
my head, just close enough to make me wince. “Man,
but you
are
in Dreamland today,” he says.
“You'd better not play like this tomorrow afternoon.”

While I'm
trying to think of something smart to say I hear
a shout from the far end of the rink,
and Junior crashes onto the ice, full gear, carrying a bucket of pucks.

“Take some shots,” he hollers. “Look at what I've got.”

Gord
and I turn around to look, and it's impossible
not to see what he's got. Even from this
distance they look bigger than the old pads, probably because
they're white. From this distance, they make him look like a hospital nurse with elephant legs.

“You
finally talked Jack into new pads?” Gord asks as
Junior skates toward us. “I don't believe it.”

“Oh, to hell with Jack,” Junior answers. “I
gave up. Bought ‘em myself. What's money when you're in search of excellence.”

Aha! I've seen Junior
reading those business wanker books in the dressing room recently and now I know wh
y.

“This isn't going to bankrupt me. I'll write
it off as a business expense.”

Junior empties the bucket of pucks in front of us, tosses the bucket over the boards, and glides
backward into the net. From just outside the blueline,
Gord and I start punching pucks at his new pads.

“These
pads are a little more bouncy than the
old ones,” I holler, as a rebound skitters back close to where I'm standing.

“After all those
years the old ones were like dead cushions on
a pool table,” Junior yells back, doing a double take
as Gord rings a shot off the post
and in behind him. “It'll keep the rebounds from
dropping in front of me. Should cut a
goal a game off my average right there.”

“If you cut
ten inches off your waistline,” Gord says, “you'd
be able to see the puck when it's in front of you.”

“Screw off,” Junior sneers, gaily. “Now I won't have to, will I?”

Just for fun, I
whistle a shot close to his head. On cue, he
drops to the ice.

“I see new pads haven't improved that part of your game.”

“Just shoot the fucking puck and
keep it down,” Junior growls. “Either that or pay my dentist bills.”

We pepper him with
low shots for close to twenty minutes before he
tires of it and retreats happily to the
dressing room, taking the bucket and pucks with him.
It's quarter past seven, and there's enough time for
a couple more turns around the ice befor
e Alpo Numinen, the Zamboni driver, will want us o
ff so he can flood the rink for public skating.

AS LOCAL CHARACTERS GO
,
Alpo is unique: to him, everything and everyone is intrinsically despicable.
It doesn't matter to him whether it's his job,
or hockey, old players, young players, recreation skaters,
his Zamboni. As far as Alpo is concerned, life is a
crapbag filled with clowns and villains, all of them out
to disturb his peace or steal his dignity and
sanity. Alpo's only virtue is that he can bring up
a different lump of crap out of the bag for everything.

He hates his job because he gets razzed by the
crowds, who regularly drone “Aaa
l-Pooooo, Aaaaal-Poo
oooo” at him while he's flooding the ice between
periods. He believes they're mocking him, and he's right
— life can be rough when you have the same
first name as a popular brand of dog food. He
despises hockey because it's too violent; he despises the older players
because they know from experience what a sour goof
he is; he despises the young players because they're too
stupid to pretend that they're intimidated by his
antics. That isn't all. He despises recreational skaters because
they're (in his words) paying money to slide a
round on a sheet of ice, and he despises his
Zamboni because it breaks down on him while he's
trying to flood the ice, making him the object of further taunts.

Alpo saves the
biggest, smelliest lump of bile to smear across the memory
of his own son, Artie, who was until Wendel
the only local kid to make it beyond Junior A hockey
in Mantua. Artie got to the
NHL
about ten years
ago for a cup of coffee, and as far
as anyone knows, it was his final cup of coffee.
He was last seen stumbling out of a bar on
Long Island dead drunk, fine Mantua product that he is.

Alpo hasn't
seen his kid since he left town for the
NHL
,
but he'll curse him out in front of anyone
who'll listen. And to give credit where credit's
due, he has his twisted reasons. As soon as Artie
left town to go to Junior A in Peterborough,
he changed his first name from Arno to Arthur
, and his last name to Newman so no one
would think he was one of those pansy Europeans.
As far as Alpo was concerned, Artie was betraying his Finnish heritage.

Alpo is exaggerating here a
little, since he didn't exactly arrive here straight fr
om a smorgasbord himself. He's a third-genera
tion cheeseburger like most everyone else around her
e. The only thing about him that's Finnish is his name
and maybe his sour temperament — although lately I've hear
d him mouthing things in some bjarny-bjarny language to impress
the Juniors. Since the most consistent thing about Alpo — aside from his bad temper — is his laziness, he probably
got his knowledge of Finnish from
IKEA
commercials on television.

I've never
met Artie, but Gord says he was a decent
kid, although — like his old man — chronically
lazy. That probably explains why he didn't stay in
the
NHL
, together with the fact that he'd had his
appetite for climbing into the piss-tank since he was fifteen. That's har
dly unique around here.

I don't get people like Alpo, to tell
the truth. Life kicks every- one, but that's
no excuse to whine about it all day and all
night. Alpo's job is really a pretty decent one.
A City maintenance super- visor's wages get him
a new pickup every two or three years, and he
really doesn't need to take all the crap he
gets. Fact is, he chooses to run the Zamboni at
all the big events because it gives him something to bitch
about. If I had his job, I'd use the facilities
every chance I got. Alpo? He hasn't been on skates
for years, just out of sheer perversity.

Look at it this way: life
is reasonably sweet provided you don't stick the air
pump into your miseries, which everyone has. So we don't live
in Los Angeles, and we're not all rich movie
producers. We're not exactly in Mogadishu
shaking empty milk jugs at the United Nations, either. If
you live in Los Angeles, you make money, go
to film premieres, and keep a loaded gun
under your pillow. Fine with me. Even in Mogadishu the
re's the beach. And if you find yourself driving a
Zamboni at the Mantua Memorial Coliseum, for crying out loud, go skating once in a while.

THE GATES AT THE
Coliseum's far end swing open, and I hear Alpo shouting at us.