The Complete Screech Owls, Volume 5

by Roy MacGregor

  Anton seemed to be becoming more fanatical by the day. One of the mayor’s assistants claimed that Anton had struck her, but since there were no witnesses, there had been no charges. Sam denied absolutely that Anton would ever do such a thing, but the police had come and talked to him and warned him, and Travis was convinced the authorities were keeping a watch on the increasingly agitated used-book dealer.

  Travis decided to change the topic with the good news he had just received the night before.

  “Mr. Imoo is coming!”

  “No way!”

  “Yes. He’s definitely coming. Fahd and Data tracked him down. He’s coming – and he’s bringing his equipment. The Mad Monk of Hockey is going to play!”

  “Fantastic!” Sarah shrieked. “I can’t believe it.”

  “They’ve already booked his flights, and he’s bunking in with Imoo and me – which should lead to some confusion. I hope he’s not going to be angry at me for naming my dog after him.”

  Sarah giggled, then sighed. “Is Wiz coming?” she asked.

  Travis felt a twinge of something. He wasn’t sure what. He wanted Wiz there as much as anyone. But he never forgot how Sarah and Wiz had gotten along on that glorious week in Australia.

  “Yes, he’ll be here.”

  “Great!” Sarah said. “I can hardly wait to see him … and Annika, and Slava, and Brody – everyone, really. But especially the Owls – and you, too, Trav. You, too.”

  “Yeah,” said Travis. “Me, too. Me, too.”

  But he knew what that twinge had been.

  Jealousy.

  Travis Lindsay, who had always prided himself on his common sense, his cool attitude – his captaincy – was jealous.

  Jealous of Wiz.

  So much for thinking he’d grown up.

  Travis had just returned from a long, sweaty run with Imoo when the phone rang again.

  For some reason, he thought it would be Nish, and he picked it up already shouting: “Yes! Yes! Yes!”

  “Travis?” an uncertain voice asked. “That you?”

  It was Sam. And there wasn’t just uncertainty in her voice. There was fear.

  “What’s wrong, Sam?”

  For a moment there was a pause. Travis thought he must have lost the connection.

  Then he heard her swallow. She was crying.

  “It’s Mr. Dillinger.”

  “What about Mr. Dillinger?” Travis almost shouted into the receiver.

  “He may die.”

  16

  Travis had only once before felt so utterly helpless. It was years ago, in the old Tamarack hospital, and the Screech Owls were gathered to wait for news about Data following the car accident.

  Ten years later, here were Screech Owls again. Sam and Travis sitting, waiting. Liz Moscovitz periodically moving back and forth with the other doctors in search of news, of a reason to hope.

  Derek Dillinger was on his way from Florida, having heard his mother speak the words everyone grows to dread: “You’d better come quickly.”

  Mr. Dillinger was in a coma. Anton Sealey was also hurt and in the hospital, though not in the same danger as Mr. Dillinger.

  Anton, unlike Mr. Dillinger, had been able to tell police what had happened.

  Three men in dark clothes, two of them carrying baseball bats, had broken into the “nerve centre” of the campaign to stop the casino. They had roughed up Anton – his knuckles were bloodied, his nose gashed – and knocked him out. The men then moved into the next room and surprised Mr. Dillinger, who had been running off posters on the small printing press and had probably not heard the ruckus outside.

  They had beaten him terribly. His skull was fractured, his face bloodied and swollen from the blows. But the doctors were not worried about the outside of Mr. Dillinger. They feared what was happening inside. His brain was swelling from the blows and threatening his life. He was being kept in a drug-induced coma. He was on life support. He was, Liz whispered to Sam and Travis, being given by the doctors a less than fifty-fifty chance of survival.

  Sam was in tears. She moved back and forth between Anton’s room in one wing of the hospital and the waiting room outside Intensive Care. And she was growing more and more angry with each passing hour.

  “How can the police say they have no leads?” she snapped at one point at Travis.

  He tried to calm her. “It only happened this afternoon, Sam. It will take time. They’ll catch them.”

  “For heaven’s sake, Travis, open your eyes!” Sam bellowed, the tears streaming down her face. “Anton and Mr. D. get beat up by guys in masks. Anton and Mr. D. are leading the battle against the casino. The people are turning against the casino. The casino operators have to shut down the movement. It’s pretty obvious, isn’t it?”

  “I don’t know,” Travis said. “I don’t know.”

  “And if not them, then the mayor and his goons.”

  “Oh, come on, Sam. The mayor? He wouldn’t be so stupid.”

  “How do you know how stupid he can be? He’s banking everything on this casino. We’re in the way. How do I know I’m not next?”

  “There will be no ‘next,’ Sam.”

  “Exactly! That’s what they’re counting on. We shut up. The police can’t find out anything. And maybe Mr. Dillinger dies, Travis. Have you considered that?”

  “No,” Travis lied.

  They were still there at midnight when Derek Dillinger burst through the doors, his face drawn from the long race from Florida, his eyes filled with fear.

  Sam never said a word. She leapt from her seat and went to him the moment he came in, hugging him and holding on for dear life. She was crying again, and Derek was too.

  He looked questioningly over Sam’s shoulder to Travis.

  Travis only mouthed the words. Still the same.

  But, of course, nothing was.

  17

  Travis was grateful there was no school. He could not possibly have done all that needed doing if classes were still on. He spent much of his time fielding calls from his old teammates, all wanting news about Mr. Dillinger. Data, Fahd, Travis, and Sarah had talked on a conference call, and they decided that rather than cancel the special night, perhaps now it was more important than ever for the Screech Owls to be home.

  Each and every one of them knew what Mr. Dillinger would say: “Game on.”

  Travis saw Derek every day. They met at the hospital, they took breaks together at Tim Hortons for coffee, and once Derek had realized he could not spend every minute of the day lingering in the hospital waiting room, the two of them began running together.

  The running helped. It distracted Derek – and, besides, he needed to be in better shape if he was going to play in the exhibition match. The two longtime friends would run up to the Lookout and down along the river, Imoo nipping happily at their heels, and they ran as often as not into Sam and little Muck down by the beach.

  The “Stop the Casino” campaign was still on – in fact, it had gained strength since the attack on Anton and Mr. Dillinger. The Toronto Star had sent a reporter up to look into the attack, and a front-page story had all but linked the violence to the arrival of Fortune Industries and the hint of organized crime. Fortune Industries had even served notice on the newspaper that they intended to sue.

  No mention had been made of a possible connection between Mayor Denzil Black and those locals most keen to bring the development in, and Travis was somewhat grateful for that. He personally could not imagine the mayor being involved with what had happened.

  Sam, however, was not so easily convinced. Her anger was apparent now at all times – even when pounding nails into the hand-painted posters she still put up daily around the beach.

  Travis worried that Sam was pushing herself too hard. She never missed a day at the hospital, though each day the news was exactly the same: Mr. Dillinger was still in a coma; doctors were still waiting to see. No one would say for sure if he was expected to pull through. And Sam was all the while taking ca
re of little Muck and running most of the anti-casino activity while Anton recovered from his injuries.

  Greenpeace, however, was getting more and more involved. The environmental group had called a press conference in Tamarack and accused Fortune Industries of “violating the most significant habitat of the oldest living residents of Canada: the snapping turtle.”

  Travis had no idea if this was true, but it made a great splash in the national media, with little Tamarack featured on all the major newscasts that night.

  The talk around town was that the mayor and council were outraged at Sam for starting this whole backlash, but if Sam was worried about herself she never let it show.

  “We’re going to kill this thing,” she told Travis and Derek. “We’re winning.”

  “That’s what I tell my dad when I talk to him,” said Derek.

  Sam stopped hammering up her sign.

  “Do you think he hears you?”

  “Yes,” said Derek. “I do. Sometimes his eyes flutter. So he’s not gone from us completely.”

  “He’s not going anywhere,” Sam said sharply. “He’s going to pull through.”

  “I don’t know,” said Derek, his voice breaking. “I just don’t know.”

  18

  Travis was home later that afternoon when Derek came by from the hospital with a large plastic garbage bag under his arm.

  “It’s the clothes my dad was wearing when they took him in,” Derek explained. “I should clean them in case he needs them, but I don’t want my mother to see them like this.”

  Travis was firm. “He’ll need them. I’ll take them down to the laundry room myself. I have to wash my running gear anyway.”

  Derek came down with Travis. Travis threw his running stuff into the washer and Derek opened the bag and began cautiously plucking out his father’s clothes.

  “I can’t do it,” Derek suddenly said, dropping the bag.

  Travis knew why. The clothes smelled of Derek’s dad. They were a powerful reminder of when he was up and about and just being good old Mr. Dillinger.

  But they were also covered with dried blood, a stark and shocking reminder of how severely he had been beaten.

  Looking at the clothes, dark and stiff, Travis wondered how it was that Mr. Dillinger had survived the attack at all.

  “I’ll finish up,” said Travis, taking over.

  In silence, Travis unpacked the clothes. Mr. Dillinger had been wearing jeans and a T-shirt, and, over the T-shirt, a checkered shirt that he rarely buttoned up.

  The checkered shirt was most bloodied. Travis wondered if it was even salvageable, but he knew he had to try. To give up on Mr. Dillinger’s clothes would be almost like giving up on Mr. Dillinger himself.

  He began unfolding the shirt, the hardened blood breaking like soft, melting plastic.

  He checked the breast pocket. There was something there.

  Carefully, delicately, Travis reached into the pocket with his fingers and drew it out.

  A playing card. Smeared with blood, but clearly the seven of spades.

  “What did you find?” Derek said. He’d been looking at a new car magazine, but now he laid it down.

  “A card,” Travis said.

  Derek looked over Travis’s shoulder and drew a quick breath when he saw how much blood was on it.

  “Your dad was always doing his card tricks,” Travis said, trying to be light about it all. “He’d been doing them with the new Owls that morning, matter of fact. Must have stashed this one in his pocket so he could pretend to pull it out of some kid’s ear or something.”

  Derek took the bloodied seven of spades from Travis.

  He turned it over and over in his hand, and Travis wondered if Derek was looking at the card or the blood.

  “May as well toss it,” Derek said. “It’s ruined.”

  Travis nodded, taking it back. He placed the card on the shelf holding the laundry soap.

  He would throw it out later, when Derek wasn’t watching.

  19

  Wilson was first to arrive. He flew from Jamaica to Toronto and rented a car for the drive north to Tamarack. Travis and Derek were running with Imoo along River Road when they heard honking behind them, followed by Wilson’s high, unmistakable laugh.

  He still sounded thirteen years old. But he looked like a man, his muscular arms and shoulders bulging through a T-shirt that looked two sizes too small. Wilson pulled over, stepped out, and the three former Screech Owls all hugged each other without bothering with a word of greeting. Imoo barked and bounced around them as if the pavement had turned into a trampoline.

  “How is he?” Wilson asked Derek.

  “The same.”

  “Will you take me to see him?”

  “Now?”

  Wilson smiled, a big, confident smile of a man used to dealing with tough situations. “Can’t think of a better time than right now.”

  It began to happen at the hospital. Wilson was in with Mr. Dillinger, holding his hand and talking to him, while Derek and Travis wandered the halls.

  Derek was first to notice the wheelchair coming down the hall toward them – a little too fast, a lot too reckless for the patients they usually saw in chairs.

  “Hijol!” a familiar voice shouted.

  Hijol??

  “Beam me aboard!” Travis giggled, translating the Klingon into English for Derek.

  It was Data, and hurrying through the doors behind him was Fahd, a bouquet of flowers in his arms.

  The old friends high-fived and hugged and slapped each others’ backs.

  “These are for your dad,” Fahd said, trying to hand over the flowers.

  “Take them in yourself,” Derek said. “Wilson’s already there.” It was almost as if an airplane had landed in Tamarack and had discharged the Screech Owls at fifteen-minute intervals. Next to show was Lars, jetlagged from the flight from Sweden, but still determined to see his old manager before doing anything else. Gordie Griffith and Jeremy Weathers came in together, having driven up from the airport in the afternoon. Andy showed, then Dmitri rolled in, driving his new Porsche.

  Travis’s head was spinning. He could hardly keep track of all the new arrivals. One by one, sometimes in pairs and in threes, they made their way in to see Mr. Dillinger, each of them talking quietly to their beloved manager as if he were wide awake and staring at them, several of them kissing his forehead, and each one holding Mr. Dillinger’s limp hands as they stayed a few minutes and then left under the watchful eye of a nurse who wasn’t sure if an entire hockey team was allowed to visit during family-only hours.

  “We’re all family,” Wilson told her. “Always have been, always will be.”

  “Hi, Trav,” a soft voice came from the doorway.

  Travis turned, not recognizing the tall young woman with the hair black as night.

  “It’s me,” the woman said. “Rachel.”

  Travis was speechless. Rachel Highboy had not only become chief of the village of Waskaganish, she had also turned into the most beautiful person Travis had ever seen: tall – but seemingly even taller in the way she carried herself – poised, smiling, and coming towards him with her arms open.

  Travis thought his knees were about to buckle.

  As Rachel was hugging Travis, he saw Jesse Highboy had arrived too. Jesse was also tall, taller even than Rachel, and also poised and striking – but he was still Jesse, still had that silly, cockeyed, mischievous grin.

  The Highboys had brought a beautiful dreamcatcher from James Bay to hang in the window of Mr. Dillinger’s room and keep away bad thoughts and evil spirits. In fact, Mr. Dillinger’s room was almost overflowing with flowers and presents.

  All afternoon the Owls hung around the waiting room and took turns going in to sit with the old manager. They talked about their lives since their glorious peewee days. Every one of them, even Dmitri, claimed the Screech Owls was the best team they had ever played on. And they talked about the players still missing.

  Sarah wou
ld arrive later in the evening, Travis told them. Her parents were picking her up at the airport once the flight got in from Calgary, and she’d come straight here to see Mr. Dillinger.

  “Where’s Muck?” Lars asked.

  “He comes,” Derek said. “He’s a regular visitor.”

  Neither Derek nor Travis told the rest of the Owls that Muck came late each day, alone, and sat through the night with Mr. Dillinger. He was always gone in the morning, the messed up newspapers in the corner the only evidence of him having been there.

  “Sam?” Jenny Staples asked. “She still lives here, doesn’t she?”

  “She comes every day, too,” said Travis.

  He did not add that she would not be coming today. The few times he had seen Sam lately, she had pressed him on when the team would be arriving. Not so she could be there to greet them, Travis knew without asking, but so she would know what day to avoid coming. He had no idea why, and he had long since stopped trying to figure it out.

  “And Nish?” Andy asked. “Where’s the old Nish-er-ama?”

  Travis shook his head. “I don’t know,” he answered honestly. “He won’t return his calls.”

  “Is he coming?” Jesse asked.

  “He has to come,” said Rachel. “It just wouldn’t be the same without Nish!”

  “I don’t think he’s coming,” Travis said.

  The rest of the Owls were all digesting this reality when the door to Mr. Dillinger’s room opened and Liz walked out in her white doctor’s coat, stethoscope around her neck.

  She was smiling.

  She was smiling wider and brighter than Travis had seen her smile for weeks.

  “Mr. Dillinger’s eyes are open!” she announced to the room.

  20

  Mr. Dillinger was awake – sort of – but still technically in a coma. He made no attempt to talk, and even if he had tried to speak, the tubes running down his throat for feeding and breathing would have prevented him from doing so.

  But his eyes were open. At times, he seemed to recognize the faces that loomed in and out of his vision. If Mr. Dillinger could see, Travis figured, he must have wondered who all these young men and women were. They would have looked vaguely familiar, but not quite right – taller, larger versions of the kids he had once known as the Screech Owls. Fahd might still be Fahd, but this Fahd had a three-day growth of beard and a small diamond in his left earlobe.