Power Forward

by Sylvain Hotte

  I hadn’t forgotten to give him Sylvie’s message, and Louis came in from the woods to pay the bills. Heavy silence prevailed at the dinner table, interrupted only by the clicking of knives and forks on plates and a few sighs from my father, which quickly sent his sister off the deep end.

  “Louis, give it a break. Alex will be back in training in a week. Everything will work out.”

  My father excused himself and went to rinse his plate in the sink. Then he started cursing about the state of the roads and all the potholes. It was the Department of Transport’s fault I’d gotten hurt. How many petitions had they signed up and down the Côte-Nord? It wouldn’t change a thing. And all those poor car suspensions and athletes’ ankles would have to go right on suffering for a long time to come.

  “It’s not just hockey,” he added. “There’s the tree planting. I need Alex if I’m going to finish on time.”

  “I’m planning to help out.”

  “No way. If you don’t keep up with the gathering and your orders, you’re going to lose customers. I’ll have to hire someone.”

  My father picked up the telephone.

  “Hello … Larry?”

  So that’s how Larry ended up spending the entire period of my convalescence planting trees in my stead. True enough, my father didn’t leave him much of a choice. When he asked Larry to reimburse him for one week of the training program, my coach replied that it was impossible; he’d already spent the money on his quad.

  “Well, good. I guess that means you’ll have to show up for planting tomorrow morning.”

  Larry was proud to have said “yes” straight away. Even if he really didn’t like being in the woods in the summer. In fact, he loathed the very idea of it. A day in the bush was his worst nightmare and from June to September he avoided it at all costs. He liked to fish but preferred the sea, where the wind blew steady.

  What you should know is that Larry is a redhead with white skin, almost translucent. I— and even more my father —have the copper-coloured skin of the Innu of the Côte-Nord. As soon as Larry started planting, the black flies of the entire region decided to hold a meeting on him. They seemed to converge from miles around on the piece of fresh meat that was Larry. A pink and tender piece of meat you could bite off in large chunks. You could tell from one look at his face.

  By the end of the first day, he’d turned not only completely red, roasted by the sun in spite of the sun screen he had slathered all over, but unrecognizable to boot: his face was swollen and bloated from fly bites.

  The loyal soldier that had endured the quagmire of Bosnia and Herzegovina toughed it out for a couple more days. Then he never returned. His body swelled up from head to toe from all the bites. It was horrible. His fever shot up and an ambulance came to take him to the hospital.

  My father, with the best intentions, sent him a bouquet of flowers to perk him up. But it seems Larry was allergic to them; it took an emergency injection to stop him from swelling up and suffocating.

  Meanwhile, I had plenty of time to be with Chloé. We took long walks down the beach or in the woods. But we stayed out of sight, far from everyone. As if we wanted it to remain a secret. It seemed like a good idea. Gossip travels fast around here. And anyway, people would find out soon enough. The news was sure to get around quick. Which is mostly why we decided to keep it just to ourselves. Because around these parts when everyone knows you have a boyfriend or girlfriend, you might as well be married. You can’t go anywhere without being asked how the other person’s doing. So we kept quiet and tried to enjoy some privacy. We wanted to see if it was going to work out between us.

  Plus, it’s exciting to have a secret like that. I didn’t feel like talking about it with Sylvie or my father. Not with Félix or Sam either.

  “Where you off to?”

  “Going for a walk.”

  “Alone?”

  “Yeah.”

  And at every opportunity, whether in the shelter of a sand dune or beside a small hidden lake, we’d find ourselves locked in a passionate embrace that seemed to go on forever. We’d kiss until we had to go, and then, unable to break away, we’d go on kissing as though it was the last time we’d ever see each other.

  Not bad.

  Which is why, when Sunday came around, I didn’t feel like going fishing with Tommy any more. I was angry with him. And it was as if my insistence in keeping the real circumstances of the accident to myself only intensified my anger. He would be to blame if my ankle healed badly, or not at all, and I failed to make the team. So there in the canoe, each time he cast his line in the water pretending as if nothing had happened, I felt like sending him overboard with a kick in the ass.

  “So,” he said, while trolling with his spinning reel, flicking his rod, “how much do you lift when you’re bench-pressing?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “What are you talking about, you don’t know? You lift some weights and you’ve got no idea how much you’re lifting?”

  “I don’t know, Tom. I couldn’t care less.”

  He shook his head from left to right. He was about to say what a loser I was when his fishing pole arced and his reel started to spin.

  “Yeah, baby!” he yelled.

  He worked at exhausting his catch for a while with that almost sadistic satisfaction typical of sport fishermen. His incessant hollering echoed off the mountains. I put the net in the water and Tommy deftly guided the fish into it. A magnificent speckled trout was wriggling in the net. Bigger than anything I’d ever seen: eighteen inches.

  Tommy was beside himself with pride. He carried on like a football player who had just scored the winning touchdown. He lifted his hand high in the air to give me a high-five. I readied my hand without much conviction and he smacked me hard. He put everything into it, no doubt expecting a degree of resistance on my end, and his momentum carried him forward. The canoe began to tip and we almost capsized. As he landed in the bottom of the canoe on his butt, I tried to stabilize the craft as best as I could with outstretched arms.

  “Man,” he said. “What’s with your little fairy high-five?”

  And, flushed with success, he quickly baited his line. Without looking, he drew it back and cast with a sudden, awkward motion. The hook caught in my cheek, just below the eye. Before I could so much as holler, he yanked it back with all the strength of his great big arms.

  Chapter 2

  Sylvie patched me up. She insisted I go to the hospital to get stitches, but I refused. There was some adhesive tape in the first aid kit. I told her it would be okay.

  “Adhesive tape! That’s not going to hold like sutures. You’ll have a nasty scar.”

  “That’s no big deal.”

  I wanted to have a nasty scar on my face. Make me look mean. I knew it would have an effect on Chloé. And I was right. She gave me the whole serious injury treatment: pampering, little kisses, the whole kit. What a feeling.

  That evening, Larry came by the house to see me and make sure I was doing the exercises he’d assigned me during my convalescence. He showed up in his usual pale blue jogging suit, wearing his smoky blue shades. Pink calamine to soothe his fly bites covered his face. Even though he was a lot better than before, he was still in a miserable state.

  “Let me see,” he said, coming up to me.

  With a grimace, I tore off the bandage so he could take a look.

  “We’ll have to keep a close eye on it. If it doesn’t improve, you’ll end up disfigured.”

  I shrugged.

  “How’s it going with Tommy?”

  “Not great. We don’t see each other so much.”

  “Shit happens… Pretty soon you’ll both be training together. I like Tommy a lot. He’s a hard worker and he wants to succeed. But if I were you, I’d keep him always in my sights. Don’t skate too long with your head down. Be sure you always know where he is on the ice. Because he’s going to test you, you can count on it.”

  Could Tommy have been deliberately trying
to hurt me over the past few days? I couldn’t believe it. It had only been as a result of his clumsiness. Even if he’d turned himself into a hulk since he began pumping iron in his cousin’s gym, I couldn’t bring myself to believe he’d turned downright mean. Maybe we’d be competitors one day, but we’d always be friends, first and foremost. But after what Larry had said, I was a little bit concerned. I’d have to start watching out for him. And as for myself, once on the ice, I wasn’t going to yield an inch. With my long reach and explosive speed, I was a force to be reckoned with and could dish it out to absolutely anyone.

  Chloé’s hair was tied up in a headband, with a long braid that hung down her back. She was wearing a black shirt splotched with paint, khaki camouflage pants with pockets all over and work boots. She was stocky, not too tall, with broad shoulders and hips and an irresistible pretty little face with a smile that never quit. She seemed designed to be happy, Chloé did. But now, for the first time since I’d known her, her smile was gone. And her eyes seemed to shine even brighter.

  She grabbed the chainsaw at her feet, pulled firmly on the starter cord. The chainsaw started up on the first try, sending a cloud of blue smoke all over the yard.

  Sitting on a lawn chair not too far away, I watched her work as I nibbled on vinegar chips and drank very lemony— and not very sweet —lemonade that Chloé’s mother had made. It had my cheeks puckering. Chloé let out the clutch and the chain started to whirl, the engine singing at the top of its voice the song our forests knew so well.

  She began to carve up a log, sending chips flying in every direction. She stopped only to brush the sawdust from her face or to spit out what had gotten in her mouth. After a while, looking not quite satisfied with herself, she turned off the saw and put it down.

  I went over to where she was. And with both hands in my pockets, I looked at the carved-up log.

  “What’s it supposed to be?”

  “Don’t know.”

  It’s true, you couldn’t tell what it was.

  “Not even a clue?”

  “Not even one.”

  “You carve something and you don’t have any idea what it is?”

  “No idea.”

  We kissed each other like crazy.

  I’d been dying to jump onto the ice since May. My ankle had healed. It was time. I’ve been playing hockey since I was old enough to put on skates. Some memories are fresh in my mind. I’m four years old, leaning on my little hockey stick to keep from falling. My father and some of his buddies are flying by on their skates as I turn circles. They make jokes and crack up laughing, hitting the ice with their sticks, calling to me to pass them the puck.

  “Pass it to me, Alex!”

  “To me!”

  “No, to me!”

  But without fail I feed the puck over to my father who heads for the net and scores. There’s no feeling like it.

  Hockey is so ingrained in my life that I start to go into withdrawal if I don’t skate for a couple weeks. It’s like the oxygen we breathe or the water we drink. If I don’t skate for a while, I start to feel like I’m suffocating or dying of thirst. I’m like a junkie looking for a fix. In fact, I’m an addict. And Larry knows it.

  That’s why he was stringing me along; that’s why he had me running barefoot in the sand, planting trees, and a whole bunch of stuff that wasn’t relevant. He wanted me to work out and get in shape, but not play. What he actually wanted was for me to go into withdrawal. So when the time came to skate, it would be like food for a starving man, with all the passion of someone stranded for years on a desert island.

  And it worked. As soon as I hit the rink, I felt like I had wings. My new blades bit into the ice with each thrust and then glided as I relaxed, then straightened my body. I was literally flying from one end of the rink to the other, jamming on the brakes and sending up a cloud of snow. I’d never felt this way before: so strong. My confidence growing, I was convinced I was ready for anything: training, camp, making the team.

  Tommy hadn’t shown up yet. The story was that he needed a few days to finish his cousin’s program. And it looked as though he could lift more than twice his own weight.

  It was a kind of relief not to have to deal with him. I could work my ankle without any pressure. I skated for hours under the steely eye of Larry, who made sure I never settled into my comfort zone, and pushed me relentlessly to surpass myself: stop-and-go, weaving around cones, skating backwards. Which I did with genuine pleasure. Because it felt good having the ice to myself at the beginning of August. Which made Larry say I was a show-off and not a team player, that I should’ve been a figure skater. And in the evening, I would hook up with Chloé. We’d go stretch out on the beach, far from the bonfires, preferring the blackness of the night, the stars and the dark mass of the sea lapping at our feet.

  The news broke two weeks before the start of training camp. Shawinigan and Quebec were involved in a trade. Two starters for a defenceman. A rookie rounded out the transaction: Tommy heard the news before me. He had a cell phone, and his agent was able to reach him immediately.

  “Cool, eh?” he said before hanging up.

  I listened to the message on the answering machine three or four times to make sure I had understood it. The second message was from Pierre, my agent. He confirmed the news and asked me to call him back to discuss a few details.

  Settled in on the green couch like I was on an amusement park ride, I was perplexed: Was it a good thing or a bad thing? I couldn’t figure it out. I called Chloé to tell her that we wouldn’t be able to see each other that night.

  My father came home from work around seven o’clock. It was raining, and he didn’t usually like sleeping up at the camp on rainy nights. He was carrying two beautiful rainbow trout. Probably from the stock they’d seeded a few years earlier. He shook them in my direction, saying we were in for a real treat. Then, noticing the doubt on my face and that I seemed kind of down, he asked me what was going on. I told him.

  “Good for you guys, that makes me happy,” he said. “You’re going to be able to help each other when things get tough. Nobody up there is going to be handing it to you on a platter. And especially not you, Alex, there’s a couple of veterans gunning for you.”

  But seeing that I didn’t exactly share his opinion, he started asking questions. And I had a hard time responding, unable to put my ideas in order. So I made up some nonsense that seemed to irritate him:

  “Don’t you think we’ll be fighting for the same spot?”

  He came to sit next to me, still holding his trout, dripping water onto the living room carpet.

  “Alex, son, don’t let that worry you. Tommy’s just not in the same league as you. He’ll be fighting for a spot on the fourth line. You belong on the number one line. You don’t fight the same fights. Remember, we talked about it with Pierre. If you don’t make the first or at least the second line, we’re going to ask that you be sent back to the midgets.”

  With that, I sighed, shaking my head no from left to right. I couldn’t stomach the idea that Tommy could make the team and that I might not.

  “Alexandre, that’s the way it is. You agreed back in the spring. It’d be useless for a talented guy like you to be banging it out on the fourth line at the age of sixteen. As for Tommy, it might be his only shot at the NHL. And I’m counting on you to be supportive. Got it?”

  Supportive? That’s a good one. My buddy is turning himself into some kind of a gorilla with his muscles growing at the same velocity as his brain is shrinking, and I’m supposed to be supportive. I hadn’t told anybody that he’d knocked me down on the road the other day. It seemed to me that I had already done more than my share.

  “Of course we’ll work together,” I said, not wanting to hurt my father’s feelings. “We come from the same town.”

  “Great! Come on, let’s get the trout going. Is Sylvie out?”

  I followed him into the kitchen. The trout left a trail of blood on the floor. I went to get the mop and clean
ed it all up while he was preparing the filets. Fish guts, fins and heads were lying on the kitchen table, stacked on a scrap of newspaper. I didn’t know where Sylvie was. She could’ve been out in the woods or visiting friends. She didn’t return until late in the evening. I was sleeping on the couch when she came in on tiptoe.

  As she took off her shoes and coat, I got up and sleepily walked towards the stairs. As she brushed by me, I asked her where she had been. It wasn’t her style to stay up late.

  “None of your business, kid. You’d better hit the sack if you want to be able to get up tomorrow morning.”

  When Sylvie used that tone of voice on me, I knew she was hiding something. Usually something about a guy. I was sure of it. I didn’t say anything, and went up to my room. I lay down on my bed knowing that wouldn’t be the final word.

  She woke me up in the morning, shaking me vigorously by the shoulders. I opened my eyes, completely confused, as if I had been teleported back down to Earth on a space shuttle. How long had I been asleep? Sylvie was really upset. She threw my underwear and my socks on my bed and opened the curtains, tossing my dirty laundry to the back of the closet, doing everything all in a whirl like when I was little and about to miss the school bus. When she told me I was late for practice and that Larry had called, it was my turn to be really upset. It was Monday morning. It was a quarter past seven. The guys had already been skating for fifteen minutes and I wasn’t there. I jumped out of bed.

  All my gear was in the washing machine. I started the dryer while my father, who had also just gotten up, chewed me out, saying that from now on he’d have to come home and sleep at the house every night and that I was irresponsible. Sitting on the dryer, which was warming up my bum, I watched as he brushed his teeth, his broad back turned to me. I hadn’t missed a single workout all summer, I told him. I’d gotten up every morning. He turned around with his mouth full of bubbles from the toothpaste, talking and spraying me with foam. I didn’t understand a word, but I’m pretty sure he was telling me he didn’t give a damn.