Break Away

by Sylvain Hotte

  The next day at school I saw Jessie.

  I’d promised myself, after everything that had happened, to forget about her and get on with my life. My father had humiliated hers, there were the multiple indecisive trips past her house, her brother Stéphane was obsessed with me ; in short, everything was massively broken and was never going to be fixed. My heart was messing up my life, big time. I had to focus on hockey. I had to rebuild my bridges with Tommy. And I had to start hanging out with his gang of girls before Félix got in tight with them.

  All the great promises I had made to myself evaporated in thin air the moment I found myself standing in front of her.

  Once a week, we spend an hour at the municipal library, which is connected both to the school and the community centre. I was walking through the shelves in the natural sciences section, looking for something on natural catastrophes. I felt like reading about tornados, tidal waves and volcanoes. But my eye was drawn to a history of boats from the first dugout canoes to the super tankers of today, from Roman galleys to Spanish galleons. There were amazing cross-sections of vessels. For the first time, I understood how the Vikings travelled in their long ships. The book claimed they were the first whites to come to the Côte-Nord. They must have been out of their minds to cross the Atlantic in their cockleshells of boats.

  I looked up, and she was right in front of me. She seemed surprised, probably not expecting to see me there. She glanced from left to right, but she didn’t leave. No doubt about it ; it was an omen. I had so wanted to see her, and everything seemed to conspire to keep her away. This was my chance. So, I said hello. And she said hi back.

  She kept looking down at the ground. Her eyes, so beautiful to me, were slightly veiled behind her long, curly hair. You could barely see her pink Pumas under her floor-length jeans.

  “I want to say I’m sorry,” I said.

  “What for ?” she said.

  “My father…”

  She shrugged her shoulders, brushing aside her hair with one hand so I could see her eyes, and looked straight into mine.

  “My father hasn’t drunk a drop since then. It’s probably all for the best.”

  Suddenly I felt like I had wings.

  “Thanks for covering for him.”

  “Thank the moose,” I said.

  “You wouldn’t be the moose by any chance, would you ?”

  She winked at me and smiled. I’d have liked it to last forever. But she turned and I watched her disappear behind the stacks. I almost went after her, but I told myself that what had happened was just right, that it was just the beginning of something and that I had to be patient.

  I thought about her all day. When a teacher asked me a question, I looked up, completely lost. Not only did I not know the answer, I didn’t even know what class I was in.

  At the end of the day I was leaving school when I saw her french-kissing Jon Sauvé, leaning up against his Honda.

  Chapter Five

  We were scheduled to take the bus to Sept-Îles the next day. As we’d be playing back-to-back games on Thursday and Friday Larry cancelled our last practice. I got there a little early. Usually, we’re the last to show up, since Sylvie’s always short of time. Once she even drove me in her bathrobe. Embarrassing.

  But not this time. When I got home around two o’clock — we get out of school early on game days — she was waiting, ready to go. We were so early that we got to the arena parking lot at four, half an hour before the bus left.

  Snow had been falling for an hour ; the old yellow bus was covered in a fine layer of powder. Larry’s jeep was parked next to the bus.

  “What are you doing ?” asked my aunt, clutching the steering wheel, the old wipers squeaking and creaking every time they cleared the windshield.

  “I’m waiting.”

  “Waiting for what ? There’s the bus, get going.”

  “Waiting for the other guys. We’re early.”

  “I know we’re early. I’m sorry, but I’ve got a meeting.”

  “A meeting ? What kind of meeting ?”

  “None of your business.”

  “Ho ho ho,” I said, teasingly. “A secret little meeting.”

  “Get out, you big brat.”

  And she literally kicked me out of the car with her feet, with me laughing the whole time. I teased her some more while I was getting my duffel bag out of the trunk. Without another glance in my direction, she took off, leaving me standing there. Her hand waving through the open window was her only good-bye.

  I went over to the bus. The driver pushed the lever, opening the door. As I got in, I looked over at Larry’s jeep. It was covered with snow except for the still-warm hood where the snow had melted. You could clearly see the head of the lynx he had painted on it.

  Up the steps I went, nodding to the driver, a new guy I had never seen before. As usual, Larry had taken the front seat. He was slouched down, his little reading glances perched on the tip of his nose, looking over his notes. He barely looked up as I passed. Uncomfortable, I went and sat in the last row. You could hear a pin drop. The snow was falling harder and harder. The guys started to file in, one by one. The bus pulled out, and even though the other guys were nervous with the upcoming game against Sept-Îles — a real good team — on their minds, I slept like a baby.

  There I sat in the locker room, legs outstretched, just about to lace up my skates. Larry was talking about the game plan. I listened with one ear, not digesting much of it. With my quad garaged for the winter, I absolutely had to find a skidoo to take Jessie up to the cabin. I would sweep the ice so we could skate together. We would race (I’d let her win) and, when we got to the other side, there’d be a snow bank we’d both tumble into, one on top of the other, in the January cold under the stars. I came back to earth, surrounded by my teammates as we left the locker room under Larry’s martial encouragement. My skates still weren’t laced and I missed half the warm-ups.

  As soon as the puck was dropped Sept-Îles pinned us in our own zone, coming hard on the forecheck. I tried to intercept their lead man but he got by me and ripped a bullet at our goalie who made a nice save with his pads. Gagnon grabbed the rebound, passed to Vigneault who relayed it to me at centre ice, where I was circling. Breakaway ! I was in alone.

  But I did one dipsy-doodle too many trying to dazzle the crowd. The puck rolled away from me and I lost my balance trying to get it back. I slid into the back of the net, carrying the goalie with me. He was a big guy from the lower Côte-Nord, and he smacked me three or four times in the back of my head with his glove, mashing my nose into the ice to make me pay for taking his net off the moorings. I went back to the bench as a new line came on the ice. I hadn’t even sat my bum down before Sept-Îles had scored the first goal of the night.

  We were behind 2-0 at the start of the second. Larry double shifted me on the first and third lines, hoping to get something going. My legs were holding up okay. It’s just that there was something missing… a fraction of a second. Usually I’m a step ahead of the play. I mean, I like to anticipate what the other guy is going to do and be the first one on the puck. That way, I can set up the play and whoever comes up to meet me has to hang back a bit. No one can beat me when I get to the puck at full speed. But as the game went on, I found myself reaching the puck at exactly the same time as my opponent and having to fight it out. I wasn’t used to being on the receiving end of so many hard shoulder checks.

  The physical play forced me to rush my game and I made more than my usual number of turnovers. At the end of the second period, we were behind 4-0. One of Sept-Îles’ goals was the result of a glaring error—mine : a blind pass right onto the enemy’s stick. In no time he was in front of the net and you can imagine the rest.

  With two minutes left to play, we were down 5-0. Sept-Îles set up the trap, bottling us up in the neutral zone. It was over. But they kept hitting me anyway, banging me around. I was sucking wind, my legs were on fire. I tried to thread the needle between two defencemen with a cr
azy move that came more from desperation than anything else. They sent me flying. I landed on my back and smashed into the boards in front of my own bench. My teammates winced, as if they could feel my pain. Above them, wearing his tinted blue glasses, Larry was leaning over looking at me, his face expressionless, his arms folded.

  It was dead silent in the locker room. Larry started marking up our mistakes on the white board. That went on for a good half-hour. Me and the guys, all sweaty in our gear, watched him use his markers to diagram our ineffectual power play, our anemic back check, our deficient neutral zone game, our blown transitions, etc. At the end, the hockey-rink shaped board was covered with red, black, blue and green scribbles.

  When he finally looked up and saw us, he realized we were whacked ; nothing he’d said had gotten through. Sadistically, as though he took a perverse pleasure in torturing us, he said we’d cover it all again, tomorrow, before the next game.

  “How’s the ankle, McKenzie ?” he asked.

  I raised my head, surprised that he’d spoken to me. Coach stared at me, waiting for an answer. I could feel the weight of my teammates’ hopes. They were waiting for an answer themselves—not some scribbles on Larry’s whiteboard, but an answer that could only come from me, the team’s star player, who only last season had led the team to the regional championships scoring twenty-six goals in the playoffs, a feat that had been written up all over the province and even made the Montreal papers. As if driven by an unconscious pressure, even though I hadn’t really felt any pain during the game and even though I knew that it wasn’t in any way the cause of my pathetic performance, I said that my ankle wasn’t one hundred percent.

  “Okay, so you sit tomorrow,” said Larry. “We need you in top shape for the rest of the season.”

  I nodded my head as if that was the wise thing to do. My teammates were also nodding, looking at each other, as if that explained why we had lost and that as soon as I was completely healed, the team would be back in the winning column.

  The next day, it was another rabid crowd, this time at Baie-Comeau. I watched as we took a 7-2 licking. Félix was everywhere on the ice. The problem : he was the only one on the team. I really like Tommy — he’s my friend — but he’s just too slow. Samuel is fast, but he doesn’t handle the puck very well. Vigneault, on defence, is another good player. He’s big and he’s an excellent skater, very mobile. There’s nothing too much to say about the other guys. Unless you’re talking about Bastien, in net, who does a good job with his long legs. The guy is skinny and not that strong, which is why it takes him a few ticks to get back up on his skates. But it’s something to see when he extends the pads and does the splits to stop a breakaway.

  In spite of the back-to-back losses, I woke up Saturday morning in a great mood. Giant snowflakes were floating to the ground. More than a foot of snow was on the way, said the forecast. I was sure that winter was here for good and we wouldn’t be seeing the mercury climb back up over zero until the end of March, except for a few warm days sometime in February—maybe. Warmer days aren’t always such a good thing in winter. They usually mean freezing rain and treacherous roads. A hard, frozen crust forms on top of the snow and it’s bad news for skidoos. On the other hand, it’s good news for lake skating rinks. Water pools on the ice and levels it perfectly, smooth as a mirror, forming a better surface than you’ll find in any arena.

  On the way home from Friday’s game, the atmosphere in the bus was pretty heavy. I sat next to the window on the right side and watched the black spruce rolling by along the 138. There was a frozen pond, nice and round. I sat up on the seat divider to talk to Tommy, who was sitting behind me.

  He was playing poker with Samuel and Dominic, a defenceman.

  “Are you in ?” he asked me.

  “No. Hey, when was it we made the rink up at the lake, three years ago ?” I asked.

  “No idea.”

  “It got real cold real early, just like now, and we were skating before Christmas. It feels like it’ll be like that this year too. What do you think ?”

  “I don’t know,” he said, not even looking up. “You let us know when it’s time to do it.”

  I nodded and sat back down. It was finally sinking in, watching Tommy bluff and take the hand with a pair of threes : this winter, there wasn’t going to be any rink up at the lake.

  Someone tapped me on the shoulder. It was Sam.

  “I didn’t forget what you asked me about the other day, and I talked it over with my pa. He said my uncle François has one for sale.”

  “What is it ?”

  “A Yamaha.”

  “What model ?”

  “I think it’s a Yamaha Bravo 250.”

  “Bravo ?”

  “Yeah, Bravo.”

  “Well, okay, bravo !”

  “Listen, he’ll give you a good price, around three hundred bucks.”

  “Cool !”

  “The only thing is, it’s up at Colombier. As soon as there’s enough snow, we can go up there together. We’ll make it a real good ride.”

  That’s why I woke up in such a good mood. I laid out my skidoo suit, my gloves and big snow boots, and I tossed some eggs in the skillet and threw in some bacon. Sylvie came down in her pyjamas, her glasses crooked, perched on the tip of her nose, still half asleep. Her long black curly hair hung down on each side of her face in total confusion. She was barefoot on the icy floor.

  “Mmm,” she said, coming up behind me. “Tell me, champ, you wouldn’t be making me some too, would you ?”

  “With broken yolks ?”

  “That’s not very tempting.”

  “That’s what I know how to make, eggs with broken yolks.”

  “You just need a little training. Make it two eggs over easy for me, yolks unbroken.”

  She sat down in her chair and put her feet up, rubbing them briskly to warm them up.

  “What’s going on, anyway ? This floor’s freezing cold. You have to get down to the basement and check the fuses.”

  “I don’t know anything about that.”

  “Louis’ll be back on Monday and until then, you’re the man of the house. It’s your job ; go check it out. And before you do that, go get my slippers in the living room. It’s too cold on my feet. I’m not walking on that freezing linoleum.”

  I put two over-easy eggs, yolks broken, and some bacon and burnt toast on her plate. She looked at her breakfast and frowned.

  Then she said, “No coffee ? You didn’t make my coffee ?”

  “Hey,” I said. “Are you some kind of princess all of a sudden ?”

  “Yessir,” she said, “I’m a beautiful and magnificent princess.”

  “Well, okay.”

  I went to the living room to get her slippers. Sylvie obviously had found a boyfriend. When she sleeps in and stays in her pj’s all day, it means she’s dreaming in Technicolour. Now, what I had to do, and this was important, was to find out who it was. And if it wasn’t Mike, I was going to have to put the screws to this relationship with any devious means at my disposal.

  “So who is it ?” I asked, standing in the Ceiling Fans and Lights department of Canadian Tire.

  “What do you mean, who ?”

  She walked through Tools and disappeared down an aisle. But I followed behind and quickly caught up to her, putting on a good move and sliding with extreme agility between two shopping carts being pushed by two old ladies who were chattering away.

  “You know damn well who I’m talking about.”

  “No I don’t,” she said, holding a hammer in her hand.

  “You don’t just suddenly become a princess while everybody’s asleep, Sylvie McKenzie.”

  She put back the hammer and headed for Household Cleaners. She was going to have to do better than cleaning products ; I wasn’t going to let her skip away that easily. Little by little, she began to give ground.

  “You don’t know him.”

  “I don’t believe that. I know everybody,” I said.

&nbs
p; “He’s not from here,” she said.

  “No way. Everybody’s from here. If it’s somebody from out of town, I’d be on it as soon as he set foot in town.”

  She fled into Christmas Decorations. That did it. Christmas tree balls, garlands and innumerable idiotic multi-coloured plastic trinkets—I just couldn’t. Especially when she began clapping her hands to get the little Santas bopping around singing “Jingle Bells.” I had to get out as fast as I could. I reached safety in the Hunting and Fishing department, where I checked out a couple of bamboo poles. Sweet. Next year, I’m gonna get me a primo fly rod and go after some salmon.

  At the checkout, she paid for a box of fuses with Canadian Tire dollars. I had figured out which fuse ran the two electric radiators ; it was blown. Down in the damp, dirt-floor basement there was the pump, some outdoor furniture like the table and chairs for the porch, and shelves where Sylvie stored the tons of preserves she made. And you’d better watch out for mousetraps. I already got a toe trapped in one. Not funny.

  It was still snowing. A big tractor sent snow flying as he ploughed between the parked cars. Sylvie, who had just sat down in the driver’s seat, opened her window.

  “What are you up to ?

  “I’m going to Mike’s.”

  “Why ?”

  “Because.”

  “Stop being a pest.”

  “I’m not, I’m going to Mike’s.”

  “Not a word to Mike, OK ?”

  “About what ?”

  “About nothing !”

  I’m not going to write what she really said, because it’s not her style to carry on like that. Let’s just say she sent me rudely packing, which made me laugh ; her reaction told the whole story. She left the parking lot spinning her wheels in the snow and I began walking towards the port, and then up to Michel’s garage. I had forgotten to put on my boots, and in no time my shoes and cuffs were soaked.