The Complete Screech Owls, Volume 1

by Roy MacGregor

  Travis poked his head out just far enough that he could see around the corner and into the arena’s main parking lot. Beyond the two buses that would take the players back to camp was a flashy red-and-black 4x4: Buddy O’Reilly’s truck, with his name on the side. Beyond the truck stood Buddy and Muck, toe to toe, arguing about something.

  “What’re they saying?” Travis asked Nish.

  “I can only make out a few things. Muck told him if he ever so much as touches one of us again, he’ll come after him.”

  Buddy was swearing now, very loudly. The words cut across the parking lot. Muck would not take well to this. He himself hardly ever swore. He threw kids off the ice if they swore. He made parents leave the stands when they swore at referees. Buddy was insulting Muck in a way they could never have imagined.

  “…washed-up old fart!” Buddy screamed.

  He swore and yelled at Muck worse than he’d yelled at Nish. “The game has passed you by!” he shouted. The disgust in Buddy’s voice was cruel. “…a bunch of losers coached by a loser!”

  Muck took a step forward and slapped Buddy’s face. The slap was so hard, Travis could hear it as plainly as he heard Nish’s stick when he had slammed it into the boards.

  “Did you see that?” Nish asked. His voice was shaking with admiration for Muck.

  “See it?” Travis said. “Did you hear it?”

  Buddy recoiled in shock. He put his hand to his mouth and looked for blood, then threw his wraparound sunglasses in on the seat of his 4x4 and attacked. He lunged at Muck, but never got there. The Zamboni driver and Jason, the junior coach, had come running out into the parking lot and were trying to break the fight up before it started. Jason had Buddy pushed back toward his truck, and the Zamboni driver had his arms circled around Muck, who was putting up no resistance. Muck had made his point.

  Buddy was another matter. He was struggling, but not too much. He seemed to be desperate to get back at Muck but unable to break free of Jason’s hold. Travis had seen this a hundred times before in NHL games. The fighters made it look as if they were trying to get through the linesman, but in fact they were grateful the linesman was there and that the fight was over. You struggled for show. You made it seem like you’d kill the guy if you could only get there–a huge, hulking hockey player in full equipment, held back by a smaller, older linesman wearing hardly any protective equipment at all.

  Travis wondered whether professional hockey fighters had any idea how silly this looked.

  That’s how Buddy O’Reilly looked now. He was much bigger and stronger than Jason, but he was acting as if he couldn’t get through him. Travis and Nish knew why. “He’s afraid of Muck,” said Nish. “The bully’s a big chicken.”

  Buddy wouldn’t throw a punch, but he was sure throwing insults.

  “You stay the hell out of my way!”

  The boys had to strain to hear Muck. “No, mister,” Muck was saying in his steady, firm, almost quiet voice, “you stay out of mine if you know what’s good for you.”

  Nish was giggling: “Good ol’ Muck.”

  “Buddy O’Reilly’s a nut,” said Travis. “This thing isn’t over yet.”

  Sarah Cuthbertson was fine. As she lay on the ice, they had locked her head into place with a special brace, then worked a stretcher under her and whisked her away to the Huntsville hospital. She’d been checked over, X-rayed, given a couple of Tylenol, and then sent back to camp with instructions that she was to rest and be woken up every two hours to make sure there had been no concussion. She’d be able to go back on the ice the moment she felt like it.

  When word went around the camp, it was as if school had been let out for the summer. The Screech Owls, most of whom had been resting in their cabins, ran around high-fiving each other and cheering. The girls from the island camp paddled over, and they all spent the rest of the afternoon swimming and skiing and kneeboarding and wakeriding behind the camp’s outboard, with Simon driving and Jason acting as spotter.

  The star of the skiing contest was, much to everyone’s surprise, Lars “Cherry” Johanssen. He could not only slalom but could take off on the one ski. Cherry was also the best on the camp’s new wakeboard, turning 360s as he took the wake, and twice trying a full flip, once successfully and once landing smack on his head, which brought a great round of applause from the dock.

  “How’d you ever learn to do that in Sweden?” Data asked when Lars swam back in after his fall.

  “You think we don’t have summer and water and fast boats in Sweden?” Lars asked.

  “Do you?” said Data.

  “Of course we do. But I didn’t learn it there. I learned those tricks in winter.”

  Wilson bit: “How?”

  “Snowboarding, dummy. You ever hear of it?”

  “You do that there, too?”

  “There’s a lot more to winter than hockey, you know.”

  Wilson tried the wakeboard but couldn’t even get up. Travis tried it and got up, but he couldn’t stay up long. Nish insisted on being next.

  “You can’t even ski on snow,” called Travis from the water.

  “If the Swede can do it, anybody can do it,” Nish announced. He was back in form. No one, Travis knew, was more relieved than Nish at the good news about Sarah.

  Nish put on a life-jacket and sat down on the edge of the dock. He called to Travis to push the board in to him.

  “You’re not going from the dock?” Data shouted.

  “Why not? Cherry did.”

  “But he’s an expert!”

  “He can do it, I can do it.”

  Nish got the board onto his feet with some struggle, then picked up the rope and gave the thumbs-up for the boat to head out. Simon put the outboard in gear and slowly took up the slack, then he gave full throttle.

  The rope tightened, and Nish closed his eyes, and hopped off the edge of the dock. The board submarined, then surfaced, and up went Nish, to a huge cheer from the crowd, led by Lars. He had done it! Nish was up and away!

  Travis stood cheering with the rest of them. He hadn’t expected this of Nish, who usually frowned upon any activity other than hockey or trying to rig up motel TVs so the Owls could watch restricted movies. He was doing a pretty good job of it, too, leaning his body just as he had seen Lars lean, digging in just as Lars had done. Only Nish, being so much heavier, was throwing up twice the spray.

  Nish turned sharp so that a thick curtain of water rose between him and the cheering spectators on the dock–then it seemed the water behind the spray simply exploded.

  “He’s down!” Gordie Griffth called out.

  “Nish fell!” Data shouted.

  “Whale!” Andy yelled.

  With everyone laughing, Nish surfaced, lake water spurting from his mouth. He did indeed look like a whale coming up for air.

  Simon turned the boat and brought it around. He and Jason were laughing as well.

  “You want to go again?” Jason shouted at Nish.

  “See if you can get up from the water!” Simon yelled.

  “I’ll try!” Nish called, choking. He began struggling with the board, but it was impossible. It kept slipping off and popping to the surface. Finally he shook his head. He couldn’t do it.

  “I’ll swim in!” he called to the boat. Jason began pulling in the tow rope, looping it neatly around his forearm as he did so.

  Nish began coming in, the life-jacket making it difficult to swim with much grace.

  “THE TURTLE!” someone screamed.

  Travis turned. It was Liz Moscovitz. She was pointing off the dock, toward Nish.

  “THE BIG SNAPPER!” Jennie Staples shouted.

  Travis couldn’t see it, but it had been there earlier. The area under the dock was home to Snappy, a huge snapping turtle, its shell as big as a truck hubcap. Sometimes on a sunny day it would crawl up on a log. It was grey and green and had a huge head and jaws. Someone said a previous camper had once tried to knock it off with a paddle and that the turtle had snapped the p
addle clean in half before slowly dropping into the water and down under the big boathouse where the boats and sails and life-jackets were stored.

  “It’s coming right at you, Nish!” Chantal Larochelle screamed. She seemed really frightened, genuinely afraid for Nish.

  Nish panicked. He began pounding the water as he tried to swim faster, but the life-jacket slowed him down.

  “HELLLPPPPPP!!!!”

  Simon heard him and gunned the boat toward Nish, who was now churning up the water as he tried to reach the boat.

  “Look out, Nish! Look out!” several of the girls screamed at once.

  Travis was running along the side of the dock trying to find the turtle, but he couldn’t see a thing. Liz was on the diving platform, so she had a better view, and she seemed to be tracking the beast.

  “He’s right under you, Nish!” Liz screeched.

  Nish howled: “AAAAYYYYYYHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!”

  Travis couldn’t believe what he was seeing. Nish seemed to rise up out of the water, almost like a whale breaching, and straight into the outstretched arms of Jason, who hauled him into the boat, stomach first. Nish spilled onto the floor of the boat while his feet kicked wildly in the air. They could see him run his fleshy hands along his toes. Was he actually counting them?

  Simon and Jason leaned over the side of the boat and peered down into the clear lake water. They were squinting and shaking their heads.

  “He’s gone!” said Jason.

  “Can’t see a thing,” said Simon.

  Liz leapt from the diving platform and splashed into the lake almost precisely where she had been pointing. How could she do that? Travis wondered. How could she jump into the exact spot where old Snappy had been seen?

  Chantal jumped off the dock as well. Then Jennie, Sareen, Beth–all the girls from the island camp. And when they surfaced, they all were laughing.

  There had been no turtle sighting at all. They were just getting a little revenge for their friend Sarah.

  Sarah was at supper. She seemed fine. She’d slept in the afternoon, and probably should have stayed in bed in the evening, but she didn’t want to miss out on any fun. After they ate, there was to be a singsong down by the beach.

  Nish stayed away from the gang gathering around Sarah’s table. He was obviously still embarrassed about the snapping-turtle false alarm. But it wasn’t just that: it seemed to Travis that Nish didn’t know how to tell Sarah how bad he felt. He was acting as if the whole thing would eventually go away if he just waited long enough.

  Travis was sitting with Sarah when the others went to line up for cookies. Jennie said she’d get one for Sarah, and Data was getting one for Travis, so the two Screech Owls captains, one former and the other current, were left alone.

  “Are you mad at him?” asked Travis.

  “Nish?” Sarah said, as if she couldn’t quite make the connection. “Mad at him? How can you get mad at Nish?”

  “Muck does.”

  “Muck only does it because he knows Nish expects him to. And he knows Nish won’t stop unless someone stops him. But I doubt Muck ever really gets mad at anybody.”

  “He sure was at Buddy today.”

  Travis told the story of the incident in the arena parking lot.

  “It’s guys like Buddy that make people quit hockey,” Sarah said.

  “I think he’s a jerk,” Travis offered.

  “You heard Roger quit, eh?”

  “Roger?”

  “The caretaker. Mr. Clifford told us. He said Roger couldn’t take working with that idiot Buddy, so he just walked off the job.”

  “No wonder we haven’t seen him around.”

  “Mr. Clifford told us he’d walk out on Buddy, too–if he could afford to.”

  “What’s he mean? He could get another job at another camp. He’s a really nice guy.”

  “He owns the island camp.”

  “I thought Buddy did.”

  “Buddy just acts like he owns everything. They’re partners. Mr. Clifford’s family used to own both camps. It was his idea to set up the hockey school. He says he needed a partner who knew hockey and had the right connections, so he threw in with Buddy.”

  “I bet he regrets that decision,” said Travis.

  The others came back with the cookies just as Morley Clifford stood up and rapped a soup spoon against a pie plate to get everyone’s attention. He had an announcement to make.

  “Boys and girls,” he said, “if I can have your attention here a minute before we start the singsong…”

  Everyone quieted down to listen. It was clear they all liked Mr. Clifford–the girls on the island adored him–and unlike Buddy O’Reilly, he never, ever, raised his voice. As the Screech Owls had learned from Muck, you didn’t need to yell to get someone’s attention.

  RRRRIIIIINNNGGG!

  It was a cellular phone–Buddy O’Reilly’s, of course. A groan went around the room. Buddy yanked the phone out of the holster on his belt and ducked out the door, seemingly grateful for the excuse to slip away.

  Everyone booed.

  Morley Clifford waited patiently for quiet to return. “…There was an incident today, I understand, at the docks.”

  A few of the kids snickered. Several of them turned to stare at Nish, who was scrunched down in his seat chewing on his cookie. His face began to turn the shade of the setting sun.

  “I’ve lived all my life on this lake,” said Mr. Clifford. “I have never seen, or heard of, a snapping turtle bothering anyone. And I called the Ministry of Natural Resources this afternoon just for confirmation. There has never been an incident recorded–ever–of a snapping turtle biting a swimmer. They are big, beautiful, gentle reptiles. They can’t move very fast on land, so they’ll sometimes strike back if someone tries to hurt them. But in the water you have nothing, absolutely nothing, to fear. Are we clear on that point?”

  Everyone turned toward Nish. As one, they asked: “NNNIIIIISSHHHH?”

  Nish’s face looked like a hot plate. He squirmed, then bit into his cookie, trying to act as if he was just one of the crowd. It wasn’t working. Nish would never be just part of the crowd, no matter how hard he tried.

  After the marshmallows and singsong they all gathered at the beach. The girls and Mr. Clifford were going to canoe in a convoy back to the island. The stars were out, and they looked magnificent. They had different stars in the country than they did in the city, Travis thought. Just as they have different traffic and different stores.

  Mr. Clifford had a circle of campers around him. He was pointing out the North Star to them. “The bright one, there. You see the Big Dipper,” he said. Everyone could see it plainly. “Just follow the line. See it now? Good.”

  He showed them Orion and the Archer and he pointed out the Milky Way.

  “There are billions of stars out there,” he said. “Not hundreds. Not thousands. Not millions. But thousands and thousands and thousands of millions. Think about it.”

  Mr. Clifford paused, and everyone thought about all those stars. Travis shuddered. He couldn’t help it.

  “Our own star is so minor as to be almost completely insignificant,” he said. “And yet our star, the sun, has nine planets that we know of–and scientists have just learned that there was once life on Mars. Think about that.

  “Now consider for a moment that it is very, very likely that every one of those billions and billions of stars has its own planets–maybe one big star has thousands of planets, who knows? Somewhere out there there is bound to be another planet our size and our distance from its sun, and maybe it’s got a lake and a summer camp where they make huge oatmeal-and-raisin cookies.”

  Travis could hear gasps all around him. None of them had ever considered such a possibility. You looked up at the stars in the city, or even in a small town, and it was as if you were looking up at a ceiling with the odd tiny light in it. Nothing more. Nothing beyond.

  “Or just maybe,” Mr. Clifford continued, “life up there is a mirror image of ours.
Maybe things developed just a bit differently up there. They say snapping turtles are living dinosaurs, did you know that? Maybe up there the dinosaurs didn’t die out. Maybe on this planet we’ll call, what…well, why not Algonquin?”–the girls from the island all cheered–“the turtles are the hockey players…”

  Everyone laughed. Travis had never heard such an imagination.

  “…and maybe right now they’re running like heck to get away from the Snapping Nishikawa that lives under their dock!”

  A huge shout of delight burst from Mr. Clifford’s audience. They turned to look for Nish and howled with laughter. Why couldn’t they have Morley Clifford on their side of the bay? Travis thought. Why did they have to have Buddy O’Reilly?

  “Come on, now, Screech Owls,” Morley Clifford shouted. “Let’s help get these canoes in the water.”

  The Aeros and Screech Owls worked together. They turned the canoes and hoisted them down onto the beach. The girls put on their life-jackets and checked their paddles and began pushing out.

  “I’m not afraid of any turtle,” Nish said as they waded into the water with Liz’s boat.

  “Nor is anyone else–now,” said Liz. She was still cool to Nish, not yet in a forgiving mood.

  But Sarah was her old self. “What’s this we hear about the World’s Biggest Skinny Dip, Nish?” she asked.

  Sarah had broken the ice herself. Grateful, Nish leapt with both feet.

  “I’m doing it,” he said. “Before the end of camp.”

  “You haven’t got the guts,” Sarah laughed.

  “Have so,” Nish protested.

  “You do it,” Sarah said, “and produce witnesses to prove it, and I’ll get you an Aeros T-shirt.”

  Sarah knew exactly how to work Nish. He’d been begging for an Aeros shirt since he first saw them.

  “You’re on,” he said.

  Tonight was the night they would fix Buddy O’Reilly. Back at “Osprey” cabin, Andy Higgins cut the blade off a hockey stick, then straightened out a coat hanger and attached it to the end of the stick with hockey tape.