“Wasn’t that enough?”
“Never stand up for a minute in court.”
“So what happened?”
“Nothing. The town turned against Fontaine. He left town. I thought he moved back to the West Coast, where he’d played. I guess he moved back here after he retired. No one ever bought the Fontaine property even though it was listed for sale – people thought it was cursed after the three deaths, I guess. Only person who stood by Zeke was Muck Munro.”
“Muck?”
“Yep. And Muck, you’d think, would have reasons of his own to blame the old man. He’d lost his lacrosse team. He’d lost his chance at the provincial championship. He’d lost his best friend on the team. But unlike practically everyone else in Tamarack, he never once blamed Zeke for what had happened.”
“How did Muck get him to coach again?”
“Who knows? Maybe he thinks getting him back in lacrosse will do him good. Maybe he sees in you Owls what the two of them lost after Liam went missing – a chance to win the provincial championship.”
“Our team? Not very likely.”
“You never know,” said Mr. Lindsay, finally smiling again. “Who’s to say Nish isn’t the greatest goaltending prospect in lacrosse history?”
“Get real,” said Travis.
An hour later the Screech Owls knew all about Liam Fontaine, Silvertip, the two dead policemen, and the great mystery of Zeke Fontaine, their new coach.
“It makes my skin crawl,” said Sarah.
“Fantastic,” said Nish.
Sarah turned on Nish, appalled. “Why would you say something like that?”
“It’s exactly what we want for our movie!”
11
Travis was getting a feel for lacrosse. The Owls practised daily – Muck handling the drills, Zeke Fontaine teaching individual skills – and it seemed when they weren’t officially practising or working on Nish’s crazy horror movie, two or three or more of the Screech Owls were gathering at the school to toss the ball around and try pick-ups and fakes and back passes.
Three games into the season, Sarah had emerged as the team’s number-one star, just as she was in hockey. She moved down the floor with the same easy grace that she had always shown on skates. And if she read the game well in hockey, it was nothing compared to how she could read plays in lacrosse: tossing balls to seemingly empty spaces, only to have her passes arrive perfectly on time; finding openings for shots and setting up from behind the opposition net in a way that might have made even Wayne Gretzky applaud.
The oddest thing about Sarah, Travis noticed, was that she made no noise as she ran. Her sneakers barely whispered as they met the floor. No huffing and puffing. Nothing. Like a film without sound. Travis, on the other hand, slapped up and down the concrete. But he was barely audible compared to Nish.
Nish, too, was growing into his role. When he moved, it was like an old train starting up. His sneakers squeaked and screeched and flapped. The foot guards of his big shin pads snapped against the tops of his sneakers. And he grunted with every effort as he moved about in the big, bulky goaltending equipment.
Nish was challenging more, coming out and chasing balls into the corners, then using his good throwing ability to send long breakaway passes down the floor. Dmitri, finally getting a feel for his stick, had become a major scoring threat with his speed, and Nish was starting to look for him more and more. Sam, with her strength, was turning into an excellent defence player, tough, determined, her cross-checks leaving opposing players wincing even before she struck.
Travis was quickly becoming the team’s most skilled stick-handler. He found he had the touch in lacrosse. He could tell, instinctively, which way and how high a spinning loose ball would bounce. He was able to pick up rolling balls on the run, using a wonderful spin of the pocket over the ball that Mr. Fontaine had taught him.
“This way,” the old man had said, “you won’t have to run straight at a ball the way players who scoop balls need to. You become like a cat with this move, able to strike from anywhere – even pluck a ball right out of another player’s stick.”
For whatever reason, Mr. Fontaine had decided Travis was his “project.” He told him he was passing on his secrets, and as soon as Travis mastered one of them the other Screech Owls would be demanding he teach it to them after practice.
Mr. Fontaine taught him how to “steal” a ball from a player foolish enough to hold the ball out front as he looked for a play. “You have your pocket upside-down,” he said, “and you come down hard on his pocket with your stick, spinning just when the two pockets hit.”
It took Travis the better part of a morning to master that one, but eventually he could do it. It happened so fast it reminded Travis of the magician’s cup-and-pea trick. There really were things that could happen faster than the eye can see.
“You’re good with that stick, boy,” the old man said one morning after practice. “But I think you’d be even better with a real stick.”
By “real” Mr. Fontaine meant “wooden.” He said to Travis he thought the Owls’ fancy new Brine sticks were flashy but useless. He himself used a very old but perfectly preserved Logan – a legendary lacrosse stick, Muck told them, once made on the Six Nations Reserve in southwestern Ontario. And true enough, it seemed that Mr. Fontaine could fake far better than they ever could, and even shoot harder than any of them, with the possible exception of Sam.
They put it down to experience.
“I want you to try mine,” the old man said to Travis one day as practice was breaking up. He handed Travis the Logan; Travis handed him the Brine.
He weighed the old stick in his hands. It felt awkward and unbalanced. It was heavier than his Brine. And it smelled.
Mr. Fontaine noticed Travis sniffing the pocket area. He smiled. “Linseed oil,” he said. “Keeps the catgut flexible.”
“Catgut?” Travis asked.
“The edge of the pocket opposite the wood,” the old man explained. “It’s called catgut.”
Travis looked hard at the edge. It was yellowed and stringy and hard, but flexible at the same time. Strung together as it was, it formed a “fence” between the soft pocket and the outside of the stick, and allowed a player to keep the ball tucked safely in the pocket. Travis’s stick, of course, was hard plastic on both sides.
He was afraid to ask where the catgut came from.
He was, in fact, afraid of Mr. Fontaine. Terrified of him. The old man never looked directly at the kids as he talked to them. Perhaps it was just the thick glasses, but the effect was a little creepy. And he never spoke to them all as a group. Always one on one. He didn’t learn their last names – a blessing, Travis figured, since he was a Lindsay and the old man might connect it to the policeman who tried to nail him for murder so many years ago – and he didn’t hang about after practice the way Muck sometimes did just to talk or throw the ball around for fun.
“Like it?” Mr. Fontaine said after Travis had picked up a few loose balls and tried a few throws with the Logan.
In a way he did; in a way he didn’t. He didn’t have a feel for it yet, but he could tell, when he threw, that there was a wonderful power in the old man’s wooden stick. When Travis shot with his Brine, there was no feeling apart from the thrust. When he shot with the Logan, it was as if he could feel every roll of the ball as it came out of the pocket, almost as if, when the ball was released, it got an extra kick from the laces that Mr. Fontaine so carefully worked through the upper portion of the pocket.
“Yeah, sure,” Travis said.
“You come out to my place this afternoon. I’ve got something for you.”
Travis looked up. For the first time that he noticed, Mr. Fontaine was looking directly at him. He could see pain in his old eyes – almost as if they were on the verge of tears – and Travis knew that he couldn’t say what he so desperately wanted to say. No, thanks.
Instead, he said what he felt he had to say: “O-kay.”
He felt a shiv
er go down his spine. It was probably the hottest day of summer. He was covered in sweat from the practice. But it still felt as if an icicle had just slid down to the small of his back.
Muck’s whistle blew at centre floor. Travis handed the wooden stick back, took his Brine, and ran, feet slapping on the floor, to join the scrum.
Muck had a piece of paper in his hands. “I have here a letter from the Lacrosse Association,” he began, before starting to read. “ ‘Dear Mr. Munro … etc., etc., etc.… We are pleased to announce that your application to have Tamarack host this year’s provincial championship for peewee has been accepted. The dates suggested by your committee are also approved, and invitations have been issued this week to fourteen teams.’”
“YYESSSS!” shouted Sarah.
Muck folded the paper and stuck it into the back pocket of his old shorts. “We have a lot of work still to do,” he said.
12
The moviemakers had a lot of work to do, too. Fahd and Data had organized the cameras – they already had Fahd’s video and had borrowed another from Mr. Dillinger – and Data was even helping Sarah work out a plot outline on his laptop computer, but they still needed to know more.
Simon was worried about how they would ever get film of bears around Tamarack.
“There are always bears out at the dump,” Jesse said.
“That’s hardly what we’re looking for,” Nish, the Hollywood director, argued. “You’re talking about bears ripping apart green garbage bags. I’m looking for bears that rip apart people!”
“How are you going to arrange that, Movie Boy?” asked Sarah. “Or are you going to volunteer?”
“Very funny,” Nish said. “We find the bear – then we worry about how we make it look like it’s attacking two policemen. Maybe we use dummies. With a lot of blood and guts and quick cuts, no one will be able to tell the difference.”
“There’s only one dummy in this movie,” Sarah shot back.
The team meeting about the horror movie did not go well. Some of the Owls were beginning to lose interest in Nish’s project. Others wanted to abandon the idea of a local story in favour of another crazy idea from Fahd. Fahd wanted to use one camera to film closeups of frogs and toads and salamanders and snakes and spiders, then use the other camera to take shots of downtown Tamarack, and run the two together and call it Invasion of the Creepy Crawlies.
“Brilliant,” Nish said with all the sarcasm he could muster. “Positively brilliant, my dear Fahd.”
“Thanks,” Fahd said.
“C’mon, Trav,” Nish said, scooping up the notes he was making in an unused school exercise book, of which he seemed to have dozens. “We’re wasting our time here.”
Travis and Nish headed out River Road on their mountain bikes. Both carried their lacrosse sticks carefully tied along the crossbar and hanging out in front. Travis had a ball stuffed deep in his pocket. Nish had his backpack, and in the pack he had Mr. Dillinger’s video camera. They were going, Travis had told him, on a “scouting” mission.
“Fontaine invited you out?” Nish had asked Travis.
“Yeah,” Travis said. “He said he had something for me.”
“Maybe a bullet!” Nish said, giggling.
“That’s not funny.”
Travis didn’t really think he had anything to worry about, going to old man Fontaine’s place in the bush, but he was nervous enough not to want to do it alone. He’d convinced Nish to come by saying they’d be able to gain a better sense of setting, and if they took the camera they could stop in at the dump on the way and maybe get some footage of bears.
“Fine with me,” said Nish. “Mr. Dillinger’s camera has an unbelievable zoom – it’ll be like you’re close enough to reach out and touch them.”
It was now mid-July, the roadside filled with white daisies and orange devil’s paintbrushes and yellow buttercups. The farmers along River Road were in the fields, and the air was ripe with the smell of the fresh-cut hay. It was a wonderful day for a bike ride, and Travis only wished he could enjoy it more. His stomach was jumping. He had no idea what Mr. Fontaine wanted him out here for.
They came first to the town dump. It had changed dramatically from when Travis was younger. Sometimes, on a cool summer evening, his family used to drive out to sit in the car and watch the bears pick through the garbage. Occasionally, bear cubs would walk right up to the cars – there might be six or seven bears in all – and sometimes a mother bear would race over and scold her offspring for getting so close.
No cars came out in the evening any more. The dump was fenced off now, and the entrance gate was chained at the end of each day. An attendant was always on hand to ensure that no one dumped toxic materials or paint cans or old tires, and there were recycling bins for everything from glass and plastic to egg cartons and newspapers.
“Still open!” Nish shouted back as he neared the gate.
They pedalled inside and over to the attendant’s shed. Travis and Nish both knew the man on duty – an older brother of Ty Barrett, who sometimes helped Muck out with the Owls’ hockey practices.
“Looking for ‘garbage’ goals, boys?” he asked.
“Good one!” Nish said, though Travis could tell he didn’t really mean it.
“Any bears?” Travis asked.
“A couple, now and then,” the attendant said. “Not like before, though. The ministry came in and shot a few of them this spring, you know. Called them ‘nuisance’ bears – but who they were bothering is beyond me.”
“Damn!” shouted Nish. “We could’ve filmed that!”
The attendant looked at Nish, waiting for him to explain.
“School project,” Nish said. “Trav ’n’ me are working on a film about area bears, good or bad.”
The attendant lifted his cap and scratched his balding head. “Isn’t school out?” he asked.
“This is for next term,” Nish explained.
“Would it be all right if we filmed one, if there’s one around?” Travis asked.
The attendant took his cap off entirely. His thin wisps of hair were tightly curled and greasy. Travis was struck by how the man’s cap left a line that split his face into two distinct parts: one that had seen too much sun, one that had seen no sun at all.
He looked about, almost as if expecting to find a surveillance camera hidden in the pines that bordered the pit where the garbage was thrown.
“Come with me,” he said finally.
Nish hauled Mr. Dillinger’s camera out of his backpack and the two boys leaned their bikes against the shed as the attendant set off for a far corner of the pit.
Travis’s nose felt like it might burst with so many smells, most of them foul and sour. There was only one sound, however, the ill-tempered screeching and calling of hundreds of seagulls. They were everywhere, fighting over the garbage, rising in waves as the attendant kicked a loose green garbage bag down and into the pit, then falling back like a soft blanket of white feathers as the bag settled.
They came to a small stand of pines with cedars growing below. The attendant held his finger to his lips to hush them, then pushed through ahead of the boys.
The branches were in Travis’s face. He was hot, and sweating, and the garbage dump stank beyond belief – but then, in an instant, he forgot everything but what he saw before him.
Two black bears were standing over a half-torn garbage bag!
Travis’s heart pounded. Sweat dripped down his nose and into the corners of his mouth. A mosquito landed on his cheek and he couldn’t even bring himself to slap it for fear of scaring off the two bears.
Scaring them off or, worse, attracting their attention!
Nish was already filming. “Man-oh-man-oh-man,” he muttered. “This is just what the director ordered.”
Travis worried that Nish might be making too much noise. But the bears seemed to be paying no attention. Travis stared at them, fascinated. At first they seemed smaller than he expected, but then one of them stood on its hind le
gs and sniffed the air, and Travis knew if he were beside it the animal would tower over him, easily.
The other bear poked his nose at the bag, grunted, and then swiped at it casually with one paw. The paw seemed to move in slow motion, yet despite the lack of effort the bag exploded into a shower of paper and empty containers and plate scrapings.
Travis imagined those same claws hitting a human head. He shuddered.
Nish was filming furiously. “Why-oh-why-oh-why does that have to be a stupid green garbage bag?”
“You’d prefer a body?” the attendant whispered, amused.
“Can you arrange one?” Nish answered.
“Sure,” the attendant smiled. “Just walk out there and try to pet one of them.”
“L-look!” Travis suddenly found himself saying. He pointed beyond the two bears. Up the hill, stopping every now and then to raise a long, pointed nose to test the air, came the largest bear Travis had ever seen. It was at least twice the size of the two bears who had just given Travis shivers and shudders with one casual blow of an open paw.
The bear paused, rose onto its haunches, sniffed the air, and turned. It had white hair along the far flank – almost as if someone had spilled bleach along him.
“Silvertip,” the attendant said.
Travis’s mind raced. The Silvertip? Impossible! He would have to be forty or fifty years old.
“Not the one they wanted to kill?” Travis asked.
The attendant shook his head. “Naw. The old guy who works here with me says there was another Silvertip back sometime in the seventies that they hunted but never caught. This one’s young – but I still call him Silvertip. Maybe he’s a grandson or great-grandson or something. He’s a mean beggar anyway. I think maybe we’d be smart to head back.”
Travis and Nish didn’t need much convincing. The big bear – Silvertip – was now up to the garbage bag the other two bears had been fighting over. The smaller bears had scattered like seagulls on his arrival, both of them scooting back down the bank with their tiny tails between their legs. The boys would have laughed except they had no desire to attract Silvertip’s attention.
The Complete Screech Owls, Volume 4 Page 13
