The Complete Screech Owls, Volume 2

by Roy MacGregor

  He was sitting up front in the Owls’ old school bus as Mr. Dillinger made his morning rounds to pick up the players from their billets. Muck was holding Le Soleil, the Quebec City newspaper, on his lap, and Sarah, with another copy of the paper, was sitting in the seat across the aisle and translating a story into English for him.

  Travis’s original diary entry had been printed in full. The story in Le Soleil, written by the man Muck had met with at the Château the day before, was a scathing attack on the tactics of reporter Bart Lundrigan of the Montreal Inquirer. Lundrigan had been interviewed for the story and had come out looking very bad. He claimed that the quotes he had run in the paper were actually a combination of diary entries and interviews with the kids, but all of the players denied that they had been interviewed.

  “He’s been completely discredited,” said Mr. Dillinger. “Serves him right.”

  “Why would he have done it?” Data asked.

  “He wanted a good story,” Muck said. “He couldn’t find one on his own, so he manufactured one.”

  “That’s dishonest,” said Wilson.

  “There are good reporters and bad reporters,” Muck said. “Just as there are good players and bad players.” In other words, case closed.

  The story in Le Soleil had an immediate effect that morning, and was first noted in the Dupont home where, at breakfast, Madame Dupont had greeted Travis with big kiss on both cheeks and a hug, much to his embarrassment. Monsieur Dupont was also pleased, and smacked Travis’s back as he came for his second cup of coffee. Nicole and J-P had just smiled.

  Nicole and J-P joined the bus with Travis, Nish, and Lars when Mr. Dillinger swung by the Duponts’ house. The players were free until the game that night, the Owls’ third, against a good team from Burlington, Vermont, and Mr. Dillinger was taking them all to the Ice Palace, where he would pick them all up later.

  “Ish-nay ee-fray!” Nish shouted as they got off the bus. Nish is free!

  “Cut it with the Pig Latin, if you don’t mind,” said Travis. “I’d just as soon never hear it again.”

  Nish giggled. “O-nay oblem-pray, avis-Tray!”

  What’s the use? Travis thought. Nish would never change.

  Travis forgot about his problems and fell in with the running, shouting gang of Screech Owls and their new friends. He felt a mitten in his glove, and saw that Nicole had grabbed his hand. She was smiling.

  “I have to stick close to you,” she said. “Sarah says we’re going to work together on your French!”

  Great! thought Travis. If French classes were always like this, he’d soon be fluent!

  They raced along the boardwalk to the top of the toboggan run, where they lined up to go down. Data waited at the bottom with his special wristwatch switched to run as a stopwatch. Nish was a good two seconds faster than anyone else.

  “Ish-Nay ampion-chay!” he shouted in Travis’s face. Travis didn’t care. He was having fun. And Nicole’s mitten was still in his hand.

  Nish tried to buy one of the bright-red hollow plastic canes so many of the adults were carrying about–and drinking from–but no one would sell him one. It was still morning, yet some of them were stopping every few minutes and taking enormous swigs, the liquid splashing down their cheeks and off their chins as they laughed and yelled while at the same time trying to drink.

  “I don’t think it’s Gatorade,” said Nish.

  “Neither do I,” said Travis.

  He finally found one sticking out of the snow beside a bench and carried it with him as if he were one of the grownups, but he threw it away after twisting off the cap and smelling the contents.

  “Here, Trav,” he said, handing the cane over to Travis. “Give this to your buddy, Barf Lundrigan–might help him write a little clearer.”

  They walked back towards the Château, Nicole pointing to everything, from the river to the benches, and having Travis repeat the French word for each. They then headed down the little side street where the artists worked, and Nish and Data and Wilson all posed for a caricature that showed them playing hockey, Nish with his stick broken and with his front teeth out and a big black eye as he sat in the penalty box.

  They went down the side streets and stairs to Lower Town and the harbour area.

  “Let’s take the funicular back up when we’re done,” suggested Nicole. “It’s only a dollar each.”

  Travis had never seen a funicular before. It was a sort of outside elevator enclosed in glass. It ran straight up the side of the cliff from Lower Town and stopped just outside the Château. Everyone agreed that it would be a terrific ride up.

  After they had seen Lower Town, the Owls lined up for the funicular. It would take them all in three separate runs. Travis and Nicole, her mitten still securely in his hand, were in the first car, and everyone squeezed in tight for the doors to close and the climb to begin.

  Travis and Nicole stood with their faces pressed to the glass. There was a jolt, and then the older part of the city began to fall away from them. They could soon see over the rooftops, and then all the way over to Levis. Up and up the cliff they went, higher and higher.

  “I THINK I’M GONNA HURL!” shouted a voice from the back. Nish, of course, the fearless defenceman who couldn’t stand heights.

  “Bet you can’t say that in Pig Latin,” said Travis, and everyone laughed.

  Travis felt so good about things. The article in Le Soleil that had changed everything. The backwards pass that had tied the game against Beauport. The little joke he had just made with Nish. The soft, warm mitten curled within his fingers.

  The gears wound to a stop and, with a chug, the big doors opened at the top.

  “What the–!”

  It was Nish’s voice again. He was at the back, and first off. There was alarm again in his voice–only this time he wasn’t kidding.

  Travis and Nicole pushed through to see what it was that Nish had seen.

  There were cameras waiting!

  Travis cringed, but then he saw that the cameras weren’t pointed at him, for once. They were jostling for position around a wall to one side of the funicular.

  The Owls all pushed out. There was a crowd gathered. People looked upset.

  It took a minute for them to struggle far enough through the crowd to see what the cameras were filming. Then they wished they had gone as fast as possible in the opposite direction.

  Someone had spray-painted the wall, in large, dripping, red letters.

  “QUEBEC SUCKS!…FRENCH = PIG LATIN!”

  “Oh, no!” said Nicole in a near whisper. Travis could feel her hand clench.

  “Regardez!” shouted a man with a camera, backing away from the wall. “C’est lui!”

  He was pointing straight at Travis. Others looked up and scrambled to move their cameras around. A reporter came running over.

  “You’re Travis Lindsay, aren’t you?”

  “Leave him alone!” Nicole shouted angrily. “This has nothing to do with him!”

  “Any idea who might have done this, then?” a woman reporter asked.

  Travis had none.

  “Get him out of here!” J-P called to the rest of the Owls.

  With Nish behind him, pushing, the Owls rushed Travis through the wall of cameras and reporters forming around him. Travis knew this would look like they were running away, but what else could they do? He didn’t want to talk to them, and he had no answers anyway. He had no idea who might have done this.

  Travis could feel that awful pain in the pit of his stomach coming back again.

  The alarming work at the top of the funicular was not the only display of hate graffti. Nor was it all anti-French. Freshly scrawled over billboards and along the wooden walls around construction sites, and even on the sides of the Colisée, were the slogans “GO HOME ANGLAIS” and “UGLY ENGLISH” and “MAUDIT ANGLAIS.” The New Battle of Quebec was being waged with spray-paint cans, not muskets.

  “Who can be doing this?” Travis kept asking as the Owls gat
hered in their dressing room at the Colisée for game three of the peewee tournament.

  “It’s probably lots of different people,” said Data. “Obviously at least two, because there’s two different points of view.”

  “What are they trying to prove?”

  “Prove?” said Data. “I doubt they’re trying to prove anything. They’re just spreading hate.”

  “What’s the point?” Travis asked.

  “To show that it’s impossible for English and French to get along, I guess.”

  “Why don’t they come to the Duponts’? They’d see we get along just fine.”

  Muck came into the dressing room, and all the players looked up. The coach looked concerned, but it wasn’t about the spray-painting.

  “I don’t like doing this,” he said when he was satisfied he had their attention, “but Mr. Dillinger has done some calculations. The tie with Beauport has put us in a tough position. We have to win by at least five goals tonight, according to Mr. Dillinger’s mathematics, if we’re to have any chance of making the finals. If we win, and Beauport wins tomorrow morning, it’s going to make three teams tied at the top in points: us, the Beauport Nordiques, and a team we never even got to play–the Saskatoon Wheaties.

  “Saskatoon’s already finished their three games. They’ve got a tie, too, but altogether they’ve scored four more goals than we have and three more than Beauport. If we want to make sure we play in the final, we’d better win by five.”

  “We’ll win by ten,” Nish predicted.

  Muck didn’t even smile. “Five will be adequate, Nishikawa,” he said, and abruptly left the room.

  “Geez,” said Nish. “What’s got into him?”

  “Nothing,” said Travis. “He just doesn’t like it when teams run up scores, that’s all.”

  “Ig-bay eal-day,” Nish said, shaking his head and bending down to tighten his skates.

  The team from Burlington, Vermont, had yet to win a game–but they weren’t that bad. They had size and they had heart. Travis had rarely seen a team work so hard. But as Muck always said, “You can’t teach talent.” And the Burlington Bears had precious little talent to spare, apart from a quick little centre and one defenceman who was every bit as good in both ends as Nish. Overall, the Owls were faster, smarter, and much better coached. If one of the two Bears’ stars didn’t do it for their team, it basically didn’t get done.

  Just before the opening face-off, Sarah had skated away from centre ice and, bending over, with her stick resting on her knees, had drifted by Travis for a quick, quiet consultation.

  “It’s up to us to get Muck’s five,” she said.

  “We’ll do it,” Travis replied.

  In fact, Sarah would do it by herself. Because he had to have the goals, Muck started double-shifting her towards the middle of the first period. She would take a shift with Travis and Dmitri, catch her breath while Andy’s line was out, and then be thrown back out by Muck on a makeshift line with Derek Dillinger on one wing and little Simon Milliken on the other.

  She played magnificently. Even though the Bears’ coach was smart enough to have his good defenceman stay on her every time she was on the ice, Sarah could not be stopped. She scored twice in the first period and three times in the second–and with only five minutes to go in the game, and with the Owls leading 7–2, Nish pointed out something that Travis had been afraid to say out loud.

  “You can go for the record!” Nish called down to Sarah from the defence end of the Owls’ bench.

  Sarah was bent over, gasping to catch her breath, and only nodded. She knew, just as Travis knew. She had five goals; young Guy Lafleur had scored seven the night before they sewed the velvet pucks onto his sweater.

  “We’re…already up…by five,” she finally gasped.

  “C’mon,” Nish prodded. “Give it a shot!”

  The Bears were giving up. If the defenceman or the little centre didn’t carry the puck, no one else seemed to want it. They just wanted the clock to run out, and were dumping the puck from their own end, causing an endless series of icings.

  Nish hated icing, and would do whatever he could to prevent one. Travis had rarely seen Nish skate forward as fast as he was flying backwards next shift to snare a dump-in before it crossed the icing line. He reached it just before the linesman could blow his whistle. The linesman waved off the icing, and Nish circled his net, still gathering speed.

  Travis headed for centre. Nish fired the high, hard one–a play they rarely attempted–and it worked perfectly. Travis caught the puck in his glove, and simply let it drop down onto his stick as he crossed centre. What a perfect pass!

  Travis was in with only the Bears’ good defenceman back, and Sarah was moving up fast. He was on the left side, with a shot at a bad angle, but Sarah might be able to get the rebound. He didn’t think he could get around the defenceman going one on one.

  But there was still the back pass! Sarah was uncovered–the rest of the Bears not even bothering to come back with the game so clearly lost–and she was dead centre, just at the blueline and headed for the slot.

  Travis slipped the puck onto his backhand, checked once on Sarah, and then pulled the puck back and around.

  As soon as he let the pass go, he knew he’d blown it. The defenceman had read the play perfectly and, with the game already out of reach, had decided to gamble. He leapt past Travis, giving him a clear run to the net, but since Travis had already committed himself to the high-risk pass, he was doomed.

  The defenceman picked up the puck in full stride. Travis was off-balance and turned, badly, into the boards. Sarah had been going full-speed towards the Bears’ net and couldn’t turn in time. Dmitri was on the far side, racing for a rebound, and he, too, was out of the play.

  The defenceman was at the red line when the little centre turned and broke for the Owls’ blueline, directly between Nish and Data, who were back-pedalling fast and trying to squeeze him off.

  The defenceman’s pass was perfect, a floater that the little centre knocked down with the shaft of his stick as he jumped through the opening between Nish and Data. Nish turned, flailing, willing to trip and take the penalty, but the little centre’s skates were off the ice and Nish’s desperate sweep met nothing but air.

  The centre was in, alone, on Jenny. He faked once to his backhand, kept it on his forehand, and merely waited for Jenny to go down. Just before he lost the angle, he fired the puck high, ticking it in off the far post.

  Owls 7, Bears 3.

  Travis skated back to the bench with his head bowed. He could feel Muck’s eyes boring right through his helmet, the heat of his coach’s stare unbearable. He knew what Muck had said about the back pass. He knew he had blown it.

  With neither coach nor captain saying a word, Travis made his way down the length of the bench and plunked himself down beside Jeremy Weathers, who was back-up goalie this game. Even Jeremy wouldn’t look at him.

  Travis sat, staring down between his legs, disgusted with himself. He felt a towel fall around his neck. Good old Mr. Dillinger. But then, he thought, the towel was also a sure sign he wouldn’t be going back out.

  “We have to have five,” Muck said.

  Travis could tell from the tone of Muck’s voice that the coach didn’t like saying this. More goals from the Owls at this stage of the game would look like they were just running up the score. Muck couldn’t turn to the sparse crowd–none of them booing Travis this night–and explain to them why he had to have a five-goal victory. He just had to hope he got it, and could get out of this awkward game as fast as possible.

  “Sarah,” Muck said, “you’re centring Dmitri and Lars.”

  Travis looked up. Lars? But Lars was a defenceman! He was being replaced by a defenceman?

  Five Owls lined up for the face-off at centre. Sarah, Dmitri, Lars, Nish, and Data. Travis checked the clock. Less than three minutes to go. They had to have a goal.

  Muck’s hunch paid off almost immediately. Lars was so quick, s
o smart with the puck, he was able to pluck it out of the face-off scrum when Sarah got tied up with the little centre.

  Lars circled at centre and dumped the puck back to Nish, who immediately tried his long floater play. He lifted the puck as high as he could, the puck flipping through the air as it rose over the Owls’ blueline and centre ice.

  The Bears’ star defenceman had read the play correctly, and leapt to snare the puck with his glove, but it was just a touch too high for him. It clicked off a finger of his glove and fell behind him.

  Sarah was already moving. She picked up the puck, moved over the Bears’ blueline, and fired a quick slapshot that surprised the Bears’ goaltender, who completely whiffed on the glove save. The puck bulged the net, the red light came on, and the Owls’ bench, Muck included, went wild.

  Owls 8, Bears 3. The five-goal lead was back in place!

  Muck sent Andy’s line out to check the Bears, and when Andy’s line tired, he put back the same five who had scored the big goal.

  With less than fifteen seconds left, Lars, with his uncanny ability to knock pucks out of the air, caught a long pass at centre ice. He moved in fast, completely fooling the only defenceman back by moving with a great burst of speed to go to the side, and then slipping the puck back into the slot area, where he was able to dodge around the defenceman and go in clear.

  It was one on one, Lars on the goaltender. He shifted. He faked. He stickhandled so fast the Bears’ goaltender went down on his back, lying there helplessly. All Lars had to do was flick the puck over the goalie.

  But he instead skated to the side of the net and turned, looking behind him. The Bears’ star defenceman was coming in fast, racing straight for Lars.

  Lars waited until the final possible moment, then flipped a saucer pass over the stick of the defenceman and hit Sarah perfectly for a tap-in goal, the net as good as empty as the goaltender turned on his back and stared helplessly while Sarah scored her seventh goal of the game.

  “You did it!” Nish shouted as he joined the pile-on. “You tied the record!”

  “Lars shouldn’t have done that,” Sarah laughed. “That was embarrassing.”