The Complete Screech Owls, Volume 5

by Roy MacGregor

  Not because he didn’t know where the player was and what he was currently doing. But because, even after a lifetime of study, he had still no idea what to make of his very best friend in the entire world.

  Nish.

  4

  What to say about Nish?

  Travis hardly knew where to begin. Nish had starred at the bantam level and played one year of midget hockey for Tamarack before the Mississauga Ice Dogs drafted him for major junior “A” hockey. He seemed, like Dmitri, bound for stardom.

  Nish had even become a fitness fanatic. The chubby kid who once said he planned to live in a world where he could drive from his television set to his bedroom had turned into a guy who ran ten kilometres every morning and worked out most days in the gym. The kid who smuggled candies everywhere he went – who once said his idea of a balanced meal included green licorice – now read books on nutrition. The kid who used to love shouting “I’M GONNA HURL!” at the top of his lungs now preferred vegetarian restaurants to Harvey’s Hamburgers.

  Nish became an all-star defenceman with the Ice Dogs. He was drafted in the first round by the Philadelphia Flyers – the team of his dreams, he said, claiming he was off to become one of the “Broad Street Bullies” – and he almost made the team in his rookie camp.

  Then he broke his neck.

  It was an innocent enough play – Travis had seen it replayed dozens of times, and it was still part of a hockey campaign against checking from behind – but, as sometimes happens, everything that could go wrong did go wrong.

  Nish was trying his signature move behind the net, standing still with the puck while a forechecker charged in to check him, then bouncing the puck off the back of the net as the winger roared by.

  It had worked perfectly, and just as Nish turned to go in the opposite direction, the other forward, also forechecking, came flying into the space behind the net. The checker Nish had just danced around clipped the checker coming in. The in-coming forward lost his balance and flew into Nish’s back just as Nish turned and was beginning to carry the puck away.

  The blow caught Nish off guard. He lurched forward and instinctively ducked his head as he neared the boards.

  There was no sound. And certainly no hint of disaster. In the replays shown so many times since, a young man and a woman behind the glass could be seen rising in their seats to cheer the hit, not even remotely aware of what had happened.

  He went hard into the boards and down. And stayed down.

  They took him off on a stretcher. They put him instantly in a “halo,” a device to prevent movement in his neck. And then they waited.

  Nish was lucky. Unlike Data, who would take years to regain any movement below his chest, Nish never really lost any movement, and after a few weeks the numbness vanished.

  The doctors said he would make a full recovery, but they also advised him against ever again playing hockey.

  To no one’s surprise, Nish immediately announced he would be making a comeback, and the following year, despite medical warnings, he had returned to the ice. It was remarkable how well he had recovered. He was as fit as ever. He could skate as well as ever. He was big and strong – but they said he was afraid.

  Nish, afraid.

  They said he was shying away from physical play, that he was “hearing footsteps.” They said he was no longer the force he used to be in the corners, that the other players had caught on to him.

  Nish had phoned Travis shortly after all this. He was in tears.

  “It’s not true,” Nish said. “But the more they say it, the truer it becomes. It’s out there in people’s minds now, and I can’t erase it. If I play cautiously, the way our coach wants, they think I’m afraid. If I gamble and start hitting, I’m not only hurting the team, they say I’m desperate to prove something and they just start coming at me all the harder. I can’t win. I’ve been beat by gossip, Trav – nothing but word of mouth.”

  Nish did everything he could to make a full comeback. He kept himself in exceptional shape, as strong, or even stronger, than he had been before his injury. He excelled in the East Coast League, got himself promoted to the American Hockey League, and was three times called up by the Flyers. But he never got into a single NHL game.

  Travis followed the press coverage on the Internet. Nish, with his wisecracks and his easygoing personality, was obviously a favourite of the Philadelphia reporters, and they kept asking why he was sitting in the press box and not playing. There always seemed to be some reason. Once, the Flyers dressed Nish for the warm-up and even had him ready before the actual game until one of the injured veterans suddenly decided his injury had healed enough to allow him to try playing.

  Travis put it all down to bad luck. The Flyers put Nish on waivers and the San Jose Sharks picked him up, but they immediately sent him down to the minors. The Sharks dealt him to the Vancouver Canucks, but he couldn’t get the call up to the big team and spent the season playing in Winnipeg for the minor-league Moose.

  From Winnipeg, he went to a minor-league team in Las Vegas, and one long weekend in March, Travis and Fahd had flown to Vegas to watch Nish play and spend some time with him.

  Nish played terribly. It wasn’t that the competition was so good; it was more that Nish had somehow lost interest in the game. He wasn’t making good decisions on the ice. His passing was off. He wasn’t jumping up into the play. He lacked his usual passion, and when the team got down 4-2, Nish seemed to accept the coming loss – something he would never have done in the old days.

  They had gone around to the various casinos, seen a few shows together, and then taken a long drive over to see the Grand Canyon.

  That drive had stayed with Travis. He could not believe the lack of vegetation, the brownness of it all, the heat and the howl of the air-conditioner on full blast in Nish’s fancy Japanese sedan. Travis had to turn it down so they could talk.

  “You think you’ll play again next season?” he had asked.

  Nish shook his head but added no details.

  After a few steaming miles, Nish cleared his throat. “I’m trying out for the Flying Elvises.”

  Travis turned sharply, blinking his unspoken question. The Flying Elvises? He’d never heard of such a team.

  “You heard of them?” Nish asked.

  “I have,” said Fahd. “Skydivers.”

  Nish nodded, chuckling to himself. “I went to see them a couple of times,” he said. “Became pretty good friends with the lead jumper. Tried out a few Elvis impersonations on them – naturally, they loved me – and they said if I ever wanted to give up hockey they’d have a place for me on the team. I start training next week.”

  And so, Nish had become one of the Flying Elvises. He and a half dozen others would dress up in Elvis costumes – satin suits, long sequined capes, white leather belts, foot-high collars, golden chains around their necks, big silver-framed sunglasses, thick black artificial sideburns, and Elvis wigs with hair as high and thick as a hockey helmet – and they put on sky diving exhibitions in Las Vegas and at state fairs. The Elvises would fly down through the sky in various formations until they broke apart at the last moment and released their parachutes. All to the sound of Elvis’s most famous tunes blaring out of loudspeakers.

  Nish also began training to become a blackjack dealer at the MGM Grand, one of the biggest casino complexes in Vegas. “Cards,” he told Fahd and Travis at one point, “are a far more complicated game than hockey.”

  That may be, thought Travis, but cards are also boring. Hockey has speed and skill and excitement. Hockey has courage and bravery and sacrifice and caring for your teammates and compassion for the ones you play against. Cards are all about being selfish, about caring only for yourself. Well, the cards he saw being played in Las Vegas were, anyway. He didn’t count games of cribbage with his grandfather – or certainly not the card tricks Mr. Dillinger used to entertain the new Screech Owls on long road trips.

  Travis and Nish slowly drifted apart after that. It seemed tha
t Nish had entered a world where everything was as phony as Elvis sideburns, where the “show” was everything and you were what others saw you in: your clothes, your car, your apartment.

  Travis, on the other hand, had gone back to Tamarack, where people saw through phoniness and did not much care for it – where, if Travis stuck sideburns to the side of his face, people would think he had gone slightly mad, and his mother would rip them from his cheeks and tell him to smarten up and quit trying to be something he wasn’t.

  The two former best friends in the world had almost nothing in common any longer, apart from the fact that they had once, many years ago, been Screech Owls together.

  5

  Two years ago, Travis had attended the groundbreaking ceremony for the new Tamarack community complex, a spectacular new development that would see the tearing down of the old Memorial Arena and the construction of a brand-new double ice surface for hockey.

  There would be ice all year round for the first time in Tamarack history. There would also be an events hall, a half-Olympic-sized pool, and a 1,500-seat theatre for amateur productions. It was the biggest thing to happen to Tamarack since the old mill had closed down and the tourism industry discovered Lake Tamarack.

  Tamarack was booming. The new mayor, Denzil Black, was a lawyer who had moved up from Toronto several years earlier and gone into developing new buildings and facilities at around the same time a new ski hill was built to the east of town and two of the summer resorts opened up championship golf courses.

  The population had doubled and then doubled again. Travis’s parents and grandparents said they no longer recognized their little town. Travis’s grandfather said that every time he took his car out he came upon a new stoplight that wasn’t there the day before.

  Denzil Black had been the driving force behind the push for the new community complex, and his work on it had propelled him into the mayor’s office. Much had happened with Mayor Black in office – new sewers and a new water system, the four-lane highway extending north from Toronto – but his council also made a number of decisions that had split the community. Opening up a quiet part of River Road to industrial development, for example, and trying to do something similar along the waterfront for another. But one recent decision of council had not caused a single voice to be raised in protest.

  The new Olympic-size ice surface was going to be given a special name: the Sarah Cuthbertson Arena.

  Travis was delighted when he heard the news on the local radio. It made perfect sense. Sarah, the hero of the Olympic gold-medal game, had always been a town favourite. There wasn’t a person in all of Tamarack who hadn’t followed her career and cheered her on.

  Dmitri Yakushev might be earning millions of dollars in the National Hockey League and better known to hockey fans around the world. And Lars Johanssen might be a star in his native Sweden. But Sarah was Sarah. If Tamarack had ever wished to present its true face to the world, that face would have belonged to Sarah Cuthbertson: friendly, open, determined, proud, and victorious.

  The official opening of the Sarah Cuthbertson Arena would be a major celebration for the town – and Mayor Denzil Black had also announced that Sarah herself would be coming.

  August 13, the mayor had declared, would be Sarah Cuthbertson Day. “It will be an event,” he declared, “the likes of which has never been seen before in Tamarack.”

  He had no idea how right he would turn out to be.

  6

  The call came from Data.

  Travis recognized his old friend’s voice immediately. Data had grown larger and heavier, but he had somehow kept his kid’s voice, slightly high-pitched and brimming with excitement. Data had always been an ideas person, and now, as an adult, he was still scheming, still planning, still throwing in the odd Klingon phrase that no one else in the world – at least not this world – could possibly understand. And still coming up with the craziest ideas that, somehow, worked. He was, Travis had decided ages ago, a true genius.

  “I have an idea,” Data began.

  How many times, thought Travis, has a conversation with Data started like that?

  “Shoot,” Travis said.

  “We play on August 13.”

  Play what? Travis wondered. Golf?

  “What do you mean?”

  “The Owls – I say we play a game on Sarah’s night.”

  “I don’t follow.”

  “It’s Sarah’s rink, right?”

  “Right.”

  “We’re her original team, right?”

  “Of course.”

  “Well, shouldn’t we be the team that opens the new rink?”

  “The Screech Owls?” Travis said, his voice rising in disbelief.

  How would that be possible? Some of them didn’t even play hockey any more. Wilson was a policeman in Jamaica – he didn’t have a place to skate even if he wanted to. Sam had stopped playing long before little Muck came along. Travis himself played “gentlemen’s hockey,” which was as close to real hockey as mini-putt is to golf. Nish was touring state fairs with the Flying Elvises. And what about Dmitri? He’d be soon headed off for Colorado’s training camp. And Lars, how would anyone even contact him?

  “Nice idea,” Travis laughed. “Won’t happen.”

  Data giggled back. “Oh, won’t it?” he said.

  Another giggle came over the line. Someone else was listening in.

  “Fahd?” Travis shouted. “Is that you?”

  “It’s me.” Fahd’s voice sounded farther away, and slightly hollow. Data must have switched over to speakerphone.

  “Listen up!” Data said, imitating Mr. Dillinger. “We’ve already had talks with the mayor’s office, and he thinks it’s a wonderful idea. We could play as a fundraiser, with the money going into the scholarship Sarah wants to set up to get young women players off to college. I’ve already spoken to Sarah, and she’s agreed.”

  Travis felt a shiver go up and down his spine. He thought of getting back on the ice once more – one last time – with Sarah Cuthbertson. What a thrill that would be for anyone! What a thrill it would be for Travis Lindsay, former linemate of the best women’s hockey player in the entire world!

  “That’s three skaters,” Travis said. “Sarah, Fahd, me”

  “You think we call you first about everything?” Fahd giggled.

  “Who else?”

  “Dmitri. He loves it. And so, too, does the NHL Players’ Association. They see it as a great opportunity to show NHL support for women’s hockey and minor hockey at the same time. Wait until you hear what we’ve got planned …”

  Travis had to sit down as he listened in disbelief. Dmitri had contacted Lars. Both professional hockey players were donating their hundreds of thousands of frequent-flyer points to Sarah’s charity. The airlines were in agreement with this, and so now anyone who needed to take a plane to get back to Tamarack would have a ticket, courtesy of Dmitri and Lars. As Dmitri had said, “I’d never have been able to use all those points anyway.”

  Travis’s job, since he lived in Tamarack, was to contact all the other Screech Owls and arrange their transportation and lodgings for when they come to town. Fahd and Data would continue to organize the actual game with Sarah and the mayor’s office.

  “Get to work,” Data said as prepared to hang up on Travis. “We’ve got less than eight weeks to pull this thing off.”

  “You really think we can?” Travis asked, still not convinced.

  “We have to,” said Data. “You only get one chance like this in a lifetime.”

  7

  Mercifully, school let out for Travis the following afternoon.

  Now that the summer holidays were here, he traded one full-time job for another.

  He finished marking his last set of exams and set about trying to track down former Screech Owls and convince them to come.

  He took over his parents’ unused basement and tacked up a flow chart that took up an entire wall. Column One had the player’s name. Column Two had h
is or her phone number or e-mail address. Column Three had the response to the invitation. Column Four had the player’s position and hockey-playing condition (“excellent” down to “non-playing”). Column Five had the airline information. Column Six had details regarding accommodation. Column Seven was tagged “miscellaneous.” You never knew what could happen.

  Sarah had agreed and Dmitri had agreed, so there was the first line put together already.

  Lars was coming, meaning they’d have a top defenceman playing at one of the highest levels in the world.

  Fahd would play defence. He was still playing in recreational leagues and said he was in good shape.

  Data would coach, or at least assist.

  Mr. Dillinger was already in town and could think of nothing in the world he’d rather do than be behind the bench as team manager on Sarah’s big night.

  Travis reached Andy Higgins in Vancouver, and Andy leapt at the suggestion that he come and play.

  “I don’t have to fight?” Andy joked.

  “No fighting – no body contact even,” Travis laughed.

  He reached Jesse Highboy at the Band office in Waskaganish. Jesse would be delighted, provided he could be granted one favour.

  “Rachel wants to come.”

  “Consider her on the team,” Travis said, knowing there wasn’t a player on the Owls who wouldn’t welcome their old friend Rachel Highboy.

  “She has one demand, though,” Jesse said.

  “Which is?”

  “She wants to wear the ‘C’- for ‘Chief!”

  “We’ll see,” Travis kidded back.

  Travis’s first disappointment came when he heard Simon Milliken couldn’t come. He was still deployed in peacekeeping missions, but he sent his best wishes and asked that his old teammates all autograph a game program for him.

  Derek Dillinger said he’d come up from Florida and would immediately start working out to get in shape.

  Jenny Staples was between movies, she said, and couldn’t imagine anything on earth she’d rather do – but she had no goalie pads.