The Complete Screech Owls, Volume 1

by Roy MacGregor

  At the exit the guard had opened for the two robbers, Travis found a fire alarm and set it off. The security alarms were probably all disengaged, but the fire alarm still worked. It began to ring throughout the Hockey Hall of Fame and it would be ringing at the nearest fire hall. In a few moments fire trucks would begin arriving.

  “Let’s go,” he said.

  From the sound of the cheering, Travis could tell that the Toronto Towers were already on the ice. They were the home team, and their parents and fans had filled up the lower seats of Maple Leaf Gardens. This was to be the highlight of the Little Stanley Cup, and even a camera crew from TSN was here. Player introductions and floods between periods. The real thing.

  And yet it couldn’t compare to what Travis already felt inside. Travis and Nish and Andy had made it back before curfew. They had told Willie, who didn’t believe them until Nish found the news channel and there was a brief report on a foiled break-in at the Hockey Hall of Fame. They made him swear he wouldn’t tell anyone.

  In the morning the attempted robbery was front-page news–complete with a composite sketch of the three youngsters who had apparently been involved somehow but had slipped away into the night. The descriptions had been given by one of the tied-up security guards–Travis presumed the innocent one–but the sketch of Travis looked nothing like him whatsoever. Nor did the drawing of Andy. Nish, on the other hand, was…well, Nish was Nish.

  Muck had been reading the paper when they came down. He had the story laid out on his lap and he kept looking at the drawings and looking up at Nish. But Nish never let on. “Sleep good, Coach?” he asked as he passed by.

  If Muck suspected anything, he wasn’t letting on. He didn’t speak to them until just before the game, when he pulled a piece of paper out of his jacket pocket and announced, “I have a letter to read to you.”

  Dear Screech Owls,

  Please accept our sincere apologies for what we did to you all. We are very sorry about what happened.

  What we did was wrong and we know it. We don’t really know why we did it, just that it happened and we were very, very lucky to be given another chance by the manager of the Hockey Hall of Fame.

  We hurt a lot of people by our actions. We hurt ourselves by betraying those who trusted us: our parents, our coaches, and our teammates. We hurt the Screech Owls by causing the team to be short players when you were all counting on us. We cost you all a chance to see the Leafs play.

  We know we can’t bring back the game, but we are all going to try to earn this trust back. We hope one day you will have us all back on the team, because that is where we want to be, more than anywhere else in the world. We love being Screech Owls and we’re proud to be Screech Owls.

  Thank you for listening to us.

  Yours sincerely,

  Larry Ulmar (Data)

  Fahd Noorizadeh

  Wilson Kelly

  P.S. Beat those Towers!

  Muck folded the letter, put it in his pocket, and walked out of the room without another word.

  Travis pulled his sweater over his head, making the worst possible face at Nish as he was momentarily hidden from view. He pulled on his helmet and picked up his gloves.

  “Let’s go!” the captain of the Screech Owls shouted as he stood up.

  Travis figured it was an impossible task. The Toronto Towers were ahead 3–1 by the end of the first period. The Screech Owls simply didn’t have the depth on the bench. Nish was playing, and giving everything he had, but he was slowed down by his bad ankle and had been on for two of the Toronto goals.

  Muck didn’t seem alarmed. At the break he simply went over the forechecking plan on his little blackboard. “It’s coming,” Muck said. “It’s coming.”

  In the second period a pass hit Travis on the shin pad. The puck bounced ahead and over the defenceman’s sweeping stick, but the defender was quick enough to wrap an arm around Travis, blocking him from the puck.

  No matter–Dmitri had it. He flew down the ice, faked a pass to Derek coming in from the left, and fired a shot along the ice that went in under the goaltender’s stick. 3–2, Toronto Towers.

  It remained 3–2 into the third. Travis looked toward Nish at the far end of the bench. He was bent over, holding his ankle, and there were tears falling off his cheek. He was in terrible pain but had said nothing. And Muck, standing behind him, hadn’t noticed. When Muck touched the back of Nish’s sweater, he jumped right over the boards. He was going to give everything he had.

  Nish tried a rush and made it to centre. A Tower hit him and the puck lay, untouched, at centre ice, where Liz picked it up and made a magnificent (was it accidental?) spinnerama move that took her around a check and created a two-on-one with Andy Higgins.

  Liz hit Andy inside the blueline and Andy tried the big slap shot that usually caused Muck to roll his eyes. But for once the stick connected perfectly. The puck blew right through the Towers’ goaltender’s glove. 3–3–tied.

  Muck had one time-out and he called it the moment the Screech Owls tied the score. The players all gathered around him, waiting. Muck just stared at them.

  “Just keep it up,” Muck said.

  That was all, Just keep it up. Why would he call a time-out? Travis wondered. Just to make the Towers think he had a master plan? Just to put them off Travis had long ago given up trying to figure out Muck.

  The referee’s whistle blew. Travis’s line was to take the face-off. Nish was on, wincing as he stood waiting for the puck to drop. Travis looked back at him and had never been so proud of his crazy friend.

  Derek won the face-off and blocked off the Toronto centre. Travis was able to get his stick on the puck and slide it back to Nish, who fired low and hard, but not at the net. Instead, the puck flew at Dmitri, who simply turned his stick blade down and let the puck hit it and glance straight into the open net.

  4–3, Screech Owls!

  The Owls pounced on Dmitri, and also Nish, who had made the play.

  “Watch it!” Nish kept shouting, to no avail. He didn’t want anyone dumping him on his bad ankle. He shouldn’t have been scurrying around the night before at the Hockey Hall of Fame, Travis thought. He should have been in bed, resting, just as Muck wanted.

  The Owls held the lead until the final minute, when the Toronto Towers pulled their goaltender for a face-off in the Owls’ end.

  “Don’t Panic!” Muck hollered from the bench. He had his hands over his mouth to make a megaphone. He sounded like Andy on the portable loudspeaker.

  But they did. Derek lost the face-off, the puck went out to the point, Travis tried to block the shot and the defender simply stepped around him as Travis slid out past the blueline. It was now six-on-four for the Towers. The defenceman shot, the puck fell in a scramble of players, and a Toronto player put it in on the backhand.

  4–4, tie game.

  Dmitri had one more chance before the horn went, but lost the puck on the deke. The Towers were halfway back down the ice when time ran out.

  Overtime.

  “I can’t!” Nish said, his voice cracking.

  Muck was leaning over his best defenceman. He had just asked Nish if he could take another shift. Muck had now seen the pain Nish was in, and he wouldn’t make him. He patted his back while Nish buried his head below the boards.

  Derek and Travis and Dmitri started the overtime, with Willie and Lars on defence. They didn’t have Nish anymore. They didn’t have Data. They didn’t have Wilson. They didn’t have Fahd.

  The puck had barely dropped when it was over. Derek poked the puck ahead, but the Towers’ best defenceman picked it up, stepped around Derek and pounded the puck off the boards so it floated in behind Willie, who turned too slowly to catch the swift winger breaking in. It was a design play, a plan, and the Towers had pulled it off perfectly.

  The winger came flying in on Jennie, who in desperation lunged toward him, swinging her stick to poke-check him as she went down. But he had too much reach and too good an angle, and in a flash he
was in behind her, dropping the puck in the net as if it were the easiest task in the world.

  Maple Leaf Gardens went crazy! The Towers’ bench emptied and the team piled on their scorer and their goaltender. Coaches, managers, parents leapt over the boards–the scene was as crazy as when a team wins the Stanley Cup.

  The Screech Owls were crushed. They came and comforted Jennie, who could only shrug. No one blamed her, of course. It was a team loss. Muck wrapped a big arm around her neck and hugged her, face-mask and all. With her mask still on, no one could tell if she was crying.

  But you could tell with Nish. He was limping on the ice, his ankle stiff and useless. Tears were rolling down his face and dropping onto his sweater. He couldn’t help it. He didn’t even bother wiping the tears away.

  The Little Stanley Cup was on the ice, and Doug Gilmour–the Leafs’ captain!–was coming on to present it. Travis looked at Doug Gilmour, who caught his eye and gave him a wink and a thumbs-up sign. He had recognized him.

  They handed the Little Stanley Cup to Doug Gilmour, and he presented it to the Toronto Towers’ captain, who lifted it over his head to the roar of the crowd. Triumphant, he began skating with it around the rink.

  Travis felt a little tap on his shoulder. He turned. It was Nish, still crying, but now smiling through the tears as they both watched the Towers’ captain hoisting the Little Stanley Cup.

  “I prefer the original, myself,” said Nish.

  Travis couldn’t help himself. He began to laugh. Andy Higgins, standing close by, began laughing as well.

  THE END

  “I’m gonna hurl!”

  Five rows away, Travis Lindsay could hear Nish moaning into a pillow. He could hear him over the tinny pound of the Walkman hanging loosely off Data’s bent ears as he dozed in the next seat. He could hear him over the clatter of the serving cart and the shouting coming from Derek and Dmitri as they played a game of hearts in the row behind. He could even hear Nish over the unbelievable roar of the engines.

  How could anyone sleep at a time like this? Travis wondered, glancing at Data. This was the first time Travis had flown, and it hadn’t been at all what he had imagined. This was no ten-minute helicopter lift at the fall fair; nor was it like the big, smooth passenger jet his father took once a month to business meetings in Montreal. This was three solid hours of howling engines, air pockets, and broken cloud. They were headed, it seemed, for the North Pole. They had all driven to Val d’Or, Quebec, the day before, and from there it was 1,500 kilometres further north by air to their final destination: Waskaganish, a native village on the shore of James Bay.

  They were on a Dash 8, an aircraft that Data–who knew everything about computers and National Hockey League statistics, but nothing whatsoever about life–claimed could take off and land in the palm of your hand. This was an exaggeration, of course, but Travis had felt it wasn’t far off when the cramped fifty-seat plane taxied out onto the runway, revved the engines hard once, and seemed to shoot straight off the ground into the low clouds.

  Travis had barely taken a second breath by the time the plane rose through the clouds and into the sunshine hidden beyond. It was as if the cabin of the plane were being painted with melted gold. Blinded by the sudden light, Data lowered the window-shade, but Travis had reached across and raised it again. He wanted to see everything.

  The pilot had come on the intercom and warned them that the flight might be bumpy and that he’d be leaving the seatbelt sign on. The flight attendant would have to wait before bringing out the breakfast cart.

  The coaches and several parents, Travis’s included, were sitting toward the back of the plane. Data’s and Wilson’s and Fahd’s parents were all there. Perhaps they wanted to make sure nothing went wrong this time the way it had in Toronto.

  The three boys hadn’t missed a game or practice since Muck let them come back at the end of a month-long suspension over the unfortunate shoplifting incident at the Hockey Hall of Fame. They’d apologized to the team and they’d missed a key tournament, and eventually Muck figured they’d learned their lesson. Travis knew they had. He’d talked to Data on the telephone almost every night during his suspension, and he knew that several times Data had been in tears.

  Jesse Highboy was sitting directly across from Travis. Beside him were his father and mother and his Aunt Theresa, the Chief of Waskaganish. No one called her Theresa or even Mrs. Ottereyes–they all called her “Chief.” She had come down to Val d’Or to welcome the Screech Owls, and now she was bringing them all to Northern Quebec for the First Nations Pee Wee Hockey Tournament, which would feature, for the first time, a non-native peewee hockey team: the Screech Owls.

  Jesse’s father had set it up. He had met with the team and parents and talked to them about the chance of a lifetime. The hockey would be a part of the trip, he had stressed, but the real reward would come in getting to experience the North and the native culture. All they had to do was get there. The people of Waskaganish were so pleased with the idea that they’d offered to put everyone up, players and parents, free of charge. No wonder so many hands had gone up when Mr. Highboy asked for a show of interest.

  The Owls had held bottle drives and organized car washes, and the parents had worked so many bingos that Mr. Lindsay celebrated the end of them by burying his smoke-filled “bingo clothes” in a deep hole behind the garage. The team had read up on the North and were excited about what they had learned: the northern lights, caribou, traplines, the midnight sun.

  “It’s spring, not summer!” Willie Granger, the team trivia expert, had pointed out to those Owls, like Nish, who figured they’d never have to go to bed and could stay up all night long. “Day and night are just about equal this time of year–same as where we live.” But no one expected anything else to be the same. No one.

  Perhaps, Travis wondered, this was why Nish had been acting so oddly. In the weeks leading up to the trip, Nish had kidded Jesse mercilessly.

  “Should I bring a bow and arrow?” Nish had asked. “Will we be living in teepees?”

  Some of it had been pretty funny, Travis had to admit, but it left him feeling a bit uneasy. Travis knew that the general rule of a hockey dressing room was “anything goes,” and certainly Jesse had handled Nish’s cracks easily, laughing and shooting back insults, but Travis still found it intriguing that no one other than Nish took such shots.

  No one expected teepees. But beyond that they didn’t really know what to expect.

  Chief Ottereyes and Air Creebec, the airline that set up the charter, had put on a special breakfast for the Owls. Once the turbulence had settled enough, the flight attendant handed out a breakfast the likes of which no Screech Owl, Jesse Highboy excepted, had ever seen. There were tiny things like tea biscuits that Chief Ottereyes explained were “bannock–just like we cook up out on the trapline.” And there was fish, but not cooked like anything Travis had ever seen at a fish-and-chip shop. This fish was dry and broke apart easily. At first Travis wasn’t too sure, but when he tasted it he thought it was more like candy than fish. “Smoked whitefish,” Chief Ottereyes said. “Smoked and cured with sugar.”

  “I got no knife and fork!” Nish had shouted from his seat.

  Chief Ottereyes laughed: “You’ve got hands, haven’t you?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Clamp ’em over your mouth, then!” Wilson had called from the other side of the plane.

  “This is traditional Cree food!” Chief Ottereyes had leaned forward and told Nish.

  “I’ll take a traditional Egg McMuffin, thank you!” Nish called back.

  He wouldn’t try the food. Instead, he’d dug down into the carry-on bag he had stuffed beneath his seat and hauled out three chocolate bars and sat stuffing his face with one hand while he used the other to hold his nose as though he couldn’t stand the smell of the smoked fish.

  They had just been finishing up this unusual breakfast when the plane rattled as if it had just hit a pothole. The “fasten your seatbelt” light fla
shed and the pilot had come on the intercom to tell the attendant to stop picking up the trays and hang on, they were about the enter some more choppy air.

  “I’M GONNA HURL!”

  With the plane starting to buck, the attendant was unable to move forward to help Nish in case he was, in fact, going to be sick. Instead, she passed ahead a couple of Gravol air-sickness pills, a juice to wash them down, and a barf bag in case the worst happened. Nish took the pills and soon began moaning.

  After a while, when the plane began to settle again, Nish called out, “Can I get a blanket?”

  Travis thought Nish was acting like a baby. The attendant handed over a blanket, and the players behind Nish tossed theirs over, too. He wrapped himself tight and pressed his face into the pillow, then closed his eyes and continued to moan.

  The pilot took the plane to a higher altitude, and the flight once again smoothed out. Derek and Dmitri’s card game started up again, the attendant completed her collection of the breakfast trays, and Nish moaned on.

  Data stood up in the aisle. “I think he needs a few more blankets!” he called out, grinning mischievously. “I can still hear him.”

  Blankets and pillows by the dozen headed in Data’s direction. Even Muck, shaking his head in mock disgust, handed his over. Data, now helped by Wilson, stacked them on poor Nish until he could be neither seen nor heard.

  “There,” Data announced. “That ought to hold him.”

  Nish never budged. Travis figured he must have gone to sleep. He hoped he was able to breathe all right through the blankets, but it was nice not to have to listen to him any longer. Travis turned toward the window and thought about the tournament and how he would play. He felt great these days. Hockey was a funny game: sometimes when you didn’t feel well but played anyway, you had the most wonderful game; sometimes when you felt fantastic, you played terribly.