“And why not, Nishikawa?” Muck asked, looking sternly on his favourite target.
“They said on the radio that the rink was closed, everything cancelled.”
Muck looked around, as if for the first time. “Rink looks fine to me, Nishikawa.”
He blew his whistle again. “Okay, we have a big game against Orillia next Friday. I want to see some breakouts and sharp passing, understand?”
Travis could hear Nish sigh behind him: “Geez.”
“Old crocks against young hotshots,” Muck said, smiling now. “But we get Sarah’s line and Jenny in net, okay?”
It took a moment for the announcement to sink in. Muck wanted to play! They had come to join in the shinny game! Travis felt a shiver go up his back. He had never seen Muck play before, only heard about him: the brilliant junior career, the shattered leg in the pile-up, the operation that didn’t quite work, the end of Muck Munro’s great dream of one day playing in the National Hockey League.
“ALLL-RIGHTTTT!” Nish screamed right into Travis’s ear. Travis winced, but began shouting himself.
Travis and Sarah and Dmitri were lined up at centre, waiting for Data to flip the puck in the air between Sarah and Andy for the opening face-off. Behind Travis, waiting with his stick perfectly poised on the ice like some old 1950s hockey card, was Muck. To Muck’s side was Ty, then Barry, with Mr. Dillinger barely holding his balance behind them, and far behind them all, Jenny was kicking out her foam-rubber pads, ready.
Never had skating felt so sweet and fun. With no boards to consider, Travis could let his feet go where they wished. He could turn at will, skating backwards or forwards whenever he felt like it. Sarah picked up the puck, circled twice, and dropped it back to Muck, who took the pass perfectly and hit Travis with a single stride and a long, hard pass that sent him straight up the creek and free.
Muck’s pass had felt different on Travis’s stick. Strong, sure, accurate, it hit the blade so hard it nearly knocked the stick out of his hand.
An NHL pass. That was the phrase Muck always used when he talked to them about the importance of making sure passes got through, how accuracy and speed won hockey games, not soft passes that people had to slow for or reach for. Travis hadn’t varied his speed a moment for the pass to arrive perfectly.
Travis came in on Nish, his friend backing up wildly, laughing and pointing the blade of his stick at Travis’s face, taunting him. Travis could hear skates sizzling up alongside him, then breaking away. Heavy skates–Ty in full flight. He flipped the puck, hoping Ty would catch it on the far side of Nish, and it worked perfectly. Ty was in alone, but without looking, he passed hard straight back down the ice, and the puck cracked hard and sure on another stick: Muck was coming straight through centre.
Nish turned back, still laughing, and lunged at the oncoming coach. Muck very casually slipped the puck through Nish’s feet, and then, as he passed by, reached with his stick and dumped Nish flat on his back, sending him crashing into a stand of bulrushes.
Muck, a huge grin on his face now, snapped a wicked pass that shot under Travis’s stick, past Ty, and hit Sarah coming in on the fly. The pass was so perfect it shot like a laser in a sciencefiction movie. Sarah faked once, slid the puck across to Dmitri, and Dmitri tipped the puck into the side of the open net.
“No fair!” Nish was screaming. “No fair! It doesn’t count! I got dumped!”
“What are you talking about?” Muck said as he tapped Sarah for her play.
“You dumped me!” Nish wailed.
“You fell over your own big feet, Nishikawa. Everyone saw what happened.”
“No way! You dumped me! Didn’t he, Trav.”
“Not that I saw,” said Travis.
“Anybody see it?” asked Muck.
“Not me,” said Ty.
“He fell,” said Barry.
“Fell,” said Data, who was on Nish’s team.
Nish was spinning around, his face twisting in fury. He looked like he was going to explode. He screwed his eyes shut, then stared hard at Muck for a moment.
“I’ll get you back for that,” he vowed.
For another hour they played, until the sweat was rolling down their spines and their shirts and jackets and pants were damp. Mr. Dillinger’s horseshoe of thin hair was soaking wet and there was sweat dripping off Muck’s chin.
But no one–no one–was as wet as Nish, who played like he was possessed, carrying the puck, passing the puck, driving the net, trying always, without success, to dump Muck Munro whenever he came close.
“He can play this game when he wants to,” Muck said after Nish made one magnificent rush that resulted in a pretty goal by Jesse Highboy.
Travis knew what Muck meant. You had to fire Nish up–bug him a little–to find the hockey player that was hidden inside. And nobody was better at firing him up than their coach, Muck Munro.
Muck blew his whistle, serious this time.
“I don’t want anybody catching cold,” he said. “Everyone head home now and change into something dry.”
The Owls all groaned. No one wanted to quit. But everyone knew that Muck was right. It was time.
“This is the way the game was meant to be played,” Muck said. “Good workout, all of you–even you, Nishikawa.”
Travis looked at Nish, who was beaming through his sweat. Nish clearly knew he had put on a great performance, and he probably also knew how Muck had inspired it.
In the evening it began to snow. It snowed hard, all through the night, and when Travis woke on Sunday morning, his bedroom window was covered with frost on the inside, and half covered with soft, pillowy snow piled up on the sill outside. The frost was beautiful. It looked like intricately painted white feathers.
With the back of his hand, Travis wiped away the icy feathers and looked out on the town. It seemed a world removed from the strange and beautiful landscape of the day before. Where yesterday had been hard as glass, today was soft and familiar as a quilt comforter: Tamarack under snow, the morning after a heavy fall.
And yet this day was just as different as the day before. Usually a big snowfall meant snowploughs and sanders and salt trucks working through the night, but today the streets were blocked. The heavy snowfall was like a throw rug over a newly waxed, slippery hardwood floor, dangerous to the step, nearly impossibly to plough.
Travis, yawning and scratching his sides, wandered into the kitchen. The radio was on low in the background, an announcer reading a long list of cancellations due to weather.
“There’s a pot of porridge on,” his mother said. “Cream of wheat–help yourself.”
Travis began spooning the thick, sticky porridge into a bowl. His father was at the kitchen window. He was leaning over, craning to see past the bird feeder and into the sky.
“It’s clouding over,” he said. “I think we’re in for more of it.”
Nish telephoned in the early afternoon. Some of the other Owls were heading out to the hill over by the school, and Nish wanted Travis to bring some cardboard for them to slide on.
It turned out they hardly needed the hill. Travis, hanging onto two large sides cut from a cardboard box, virtually glided down River Street to Cedar, where Nish was waiting for him.
There were two perfect channels in the snow where Nish had slid across the intersection and landed, flat on his back, in the snowbank on the far side. He lay there, calmly picking up mittfuls of snow and dropping them into his open mouth as if they were juicy grapes.
“No school tomorrow,” Nish announced as Travis came, slipping and sliding, to an uneasy stop beside him.
“How do you know?”
“No way they’re going to get the streets cleared in time. My dad says they can’t even get the trucks out onto the road.”
“I liked it better yesterday,” said Travis.
“So did I,” agreed Nish. “Best winter’s day in history.”
Travis didn’t bother to argue. Christmas was usually pretty good, and so was Travis’
s birthday, March 18. But he knew Nish’s way of talking only too well. Everything was either the best thing that had ever happened, or the worst thing that had ever happened. In between didn’t exist for Nish. In between, Travis smiled to himself, was where the rest of the world–the real world–lived.
They set off for the hill by the schoolyard, dragging their cardboard behind them. Data and Andy were already there and had their own supply of cardboard, which flattened the fresh snow against the ice below and made a slick, quick run that took them flying down the hill and right out across the schoolyard where, eventually, they came to a halt. Nish, with his extra weight–and, Andy claimed, a little bit of cheating–set a “New World Record” for distance, reaching the far side of the playground on one great run.
Slowly, the Owls gathered. Sarah and Jenny showed up together, followed by Liz. Jesse Highboy came wearing a pair of mukluks from James Bay, soft rabbit-skin boots that let him slide so easily the rest of the Owls were able to stand in a circle in the schoolyard and send him skidding and bouncing back and forth like a pinball. Dmitri came, and Lars, Derek, Wilson, Jeremy, Simon–one by one they arrived until virtually the entire Screech Owls team was assembled at the schoolyard, the very place that next day most of them were hoping to avoid.
“A new New World Record!” Nish announced grandly from the top of the hill. “Guaranteed!”
Everyone stood back and watched him preparing to leap, like a belly-flopper, off the crest of the hill and onto the cardboard slide.
A car horn honked loudly.
“Thank you,” Nish waved toward the car. “Thank you very much. Thank you.”
The horn blew again.
“He’s not honking at you!” Andy shouted. “He’s stuck!”
Nish paid no attention. Presuming, as always, that the entire world was watching him, cheering him on, he leapt out into the air and landed, with a puff of light snow, on the top of the run.
The car horn honked again, longer this time.
“Let’s see if we can push him out!” Jesse called to the rest of the Owls.
“C’mon!” called Jeremy.
“He shouldn’t even be out,” said Sarah as she caught up to Travis.
“I can’t make out who it is,” said Travis.
The car was almost completely covered in snow. The driver had dug a round hole through the snow on the windshield, but otherwise there was no way of seeing in or out. The back window was buried. The side windows were caked with snow.
“That’s dangerous,” said Sarah.
“Dangerous just to try driving in this,” said Travis.
The driver’s door opened, and the snow just above it on the roof broke off in a silent, white explosion, covering the red coat and hat attempting to emerge.
It was Mrs. Vanderhoof, an elderly woman from the apartments near the church. In a moment she was brushing away the snow from her coat and face and seemed, somehow, both frightened and excited at the same time.
“Well,” she said in a grand, theatrical voice, “that was quite a ride!”
She was giggling and shaking at the same time.
“They haven’t sanded the roads,” said Sarah. “Cars can’t get anywhere.”
“I can see that, my dear,” Mrs. Vanderhoof said indulgently. “I think I shall simply return home and wait for them to fix the streets properly. This wouldn’t have happened, young lady, if my father were still the mayor of this poor town.”
Mrs. Vanderhoof began getting back into her car. Sarah winked at Travis and went to work trying to clear off a better view for the old woman. She used her arms to sweep the windows clear, and some of the other Owls moved in to help.
Travis was amused by the way older people so often talked about the way things used to be. It seemed nothing was ever as good as the way things used to be. If he believed everything his parents and grandparents–and people like Mrs. Vanderhoof–told him, then surely the past had to be a world where the sun always shone, where no one ever had any money but everyone was far happier without it, where everyone was honest, where the cuts of meat were always better, where a pop cost a nickel, where people helped each other out, and, it seemed, where the moment a snowflake struck the ground, a sander was standing by to make sure no one slipped on it.
The automatic window on the driver’s side groaned, then gave, and as it lowered, the snow it was supporting dropped away, sending a cloud of sparkling white in over Mrs. Vanderhoof’s shoulder and face. She practically spit through the snow as she barked out her orders.
“You’re going to have to push me out of here!” she commanded.
The Screech Owls crowded around the rear of the car where the wheels had caught in the heavier snow. Some of the kids pulled snow away with their arms. Others kicked it away with their boots.
“New World Record! New World Record!”
None of them even turned as Nish, red and sweating, came scrambling up the incline to where Mrs. Vanderhoof’s car was marooned.
“I beat–my old–record by twenty–feet!” he puffed.
“Who cares?” Sarah said. “Get back there and push!”
Nish looked shocked at her lack of interest, but he hurried back to the rear of the car anyway, where the others were starting to push.
“I got a new world…” Nish began again.
But no one was listening.
“If we rock it enough,” Andy was saying, “it’ll come free.”
“Now!” Data called. “Now!”
With Mrs. Vanderhoof gunning the engine, and the car wheels screaming as they spun and found nothing but ice, the Owls worked steadily, as a team. Finally, on one of Data’s mighty yells, the car lifted free and slid out onto the road again, Mrs. Vanderhoof hauling the wheel the wrong way so the car almost spun right around.
“One-eighty!” Simon shouted. “Go for it, Mrs. Vanderhoof!”
“Go easy on the gas,” Sarah told her through the open window. “Take it easy and we’ll push.”
Mrs. Vanderhoof nodded and gripped the wheel as if she were a fighter pilot about to drop down through the clouds. Sarah turned so she wouldn’t laugh and hurried to rejoin the rest of the Owls preparing to push once more.
“Easy, now!” Sarah shouted ahead to Mrs. Vanderhoof.
Mrs. Vanderhoof listened. She eased off on the gas, and, with the Owls pushing hard, the tires found some grip on the ice and the car began moving, slowly, back up the street.
They pushed until the road flattened out near Mrs. Vanderhoof’s apartment building. Travis was working hard, his eyes closed. When he opened them, he realized that Mrs. Vanderhoof’s was the only vehicle out on the road. The way back to her apartment was absolutely clear but for her own winding tracks through the snow; no one else had been foolish enough to try the roads before they were ploughed and sanded.
This must have been the way it was in the days before they salted and sanded the roads, thought Travis. This must have been what roads were like when they used chains on the tires. He remembered his father laughing when he talked about “hitching” in the good old days.
Why not? Travis thought. Why not?
The car was moving on its own, now. Most of the Owls had already let go as Mrs. Vanderhoof began gathering speed, the tires holding fairly well on the flat stretch.
“Go!” Nish called as he gave one last mighty push.
Travis was the last of them still hanging onto the car. He knew he, too, should push off. But he had to see what “hitching” felt like. He dropped down into a crouch, and grasped the bumper firmly.
He felt the ground rush under his feet; he was sliding along behind the car as if on air.
No wonder his father had compared it to waterskiing! Travis giggled as he felt the ice cobble of the road tickling the bottoms of his feet through his boot-soles. He was slipping along faster, now, the ground moving under him quickly and smoothly.
“TRAAA-VISSS! WHAT’RE YOU DOING?”
Travis giggled at the challenge in Nish’s voice, the
near anger. For once, Travis was the one misbehaving and Nish was acting sensibly.
He let go again with his right hand and waved.
Mrs. Vanderhoof slowed for the turn into her parking lot, and Travis dug hard, using the edges of his winter boots against the ice. The moment he felt them bite, he let go and flew on down the street, while Mrs. Vanderhoof, completely unaware that she had had a “hitcher,” headed back into the safety of her parking lot.
Travis slid and slid, turning gracefully in his crouch as he travelled towards a waiting snowbank. He could hear the rest of the Owls, shouting and screaming as they chased after him.
“Traaaaa-visssss!”
“YAY, TRAA-VISS!”
There was no disapproval in Data’s voice, or Andy’s, or Jesse’s, or even Sarah’s. He could hear them all, running after him, as thrilled as he was by his father’s old game of “hitching.”
Nish was one of the first to reach Travis. Unlike the others, he seemed almost angry.
“What’re you doing?”
“Hitching.”
“What?”
“Hitching,” Travis repeated.
“What’s that?”
“My dad used to do it in the days before they salted and sanded the streets. He and his friends used to travel all over town that way.”
“They did?” squealed Jenny. “Neat!”
“Awesome,” said Simon.
“Some people do it on the country roads in Sweden,” said Lars. “But it’s against the law.”
“It probably is here, too,” said Travis. “Besides, you can’t do it once the streets are salted. Your feet would catch and you’d go down face first.”
“Sounds dangerous,” said Sarah.
“Sounds fun,” said Andy.
“Sounds stupid,” said Nish.
“You’re just jealous ’cause you weren’t first,” said Data, matter-of-factly.
No one else said anything. They all knew Data was right.
“Let’s go hitching!” shouted Wilson.
“Yeah!”
“There’s no other cars out,” said Nish in a voice that would dampen spirits at a birthday party.
The Complete Screech Owls, Volume 2 Page 24
