The Last of the Lumbermen Read Online Free Page B

ought to keep their weapons holstered until marriage — I swear he really believed that — but he didn’t say much.
    I got an apartment of my own with a couple of other guys, went to work in a supermarket bagging groceries, and settled down to figure out what to do with my life. The figuring didn’t go well, and before very long I slipped to about where Andy Bathgate had been headed — drinking too much beer, driving cars, and going to every party I could find. The part of me that remained Billy Menzies slipped into playing Senior hockey for the Chilliwack Christian Lions.
    I’VE PLAYED ON A couple of Senior teams in my time that could have made pureed banana out of a lot of Junior A teams, and who on a good night might have given an NHL team a run. The Chilliwack Christian Lions, despite the goofy name, were one of the best. It wasn’t religion that made us good, and it wasn’t the coaching. We were all under twenty-five, and most of us had good skills. We hung out together outside of hockey, and we liked one another, and, despite the pious stage we were on, we spent a lot of time getting d runk together.
    These days, most Senior leagues are filled with washouts from Juniors mixed in with a few older guys like me. The best players are what I call homers: local players who make their game — and the other parts of their lives — out of character and, more often than you’d think, brains. I’ve played with lots of guys in their thirties and early forties who a re better players than they were at twenty. Sure, the legs may have died, and the grand ambitions are gone, but the love of the game is still there, trimmed down to a scale that fits. In a time when everyone and everything is trying to r emake the world with levered debt, World Class p retense, and over-scale self-esteem, how many people do you know who can walk across the street in synch with their surroundings, and without wishing they were somewhere else? Well, Senior hockey has ‘em. Not many, but enough.
    Take Gor d, for a perfect example. He’s six-one and close to two hundred and sixty pounds. If you spotted him and his nineteeninch neck on the street or in a bar, you’d swear he was a no-good down-and-dirty middle-aged trucker. The truth is that he needs that nineteen-inch neck to support his brain, which is big enough that he can’t get a hockey helmet to fit a round his skull. So what if he can’t wheel because of an old back injury, can’t turn to the left because the outside ligaments on his left knee are flapping with loose cartilage? So what if he’s closer to fifty than to forty? You never hear him whining about what he could have been, because he doesn’t want to be anywhere but exactly where he is. He’s a medical doctor, not a truck driver, so he has real smarts. In fact, he’s the district coroner.
    Maybe, come to think of it, that’s why he’s always talking about time. He sees what’s at the business end of it more times a week than most people do in a lifetime. Hell, he’s probably seen a dozen people who’ve been run over by r eal freight trains.
    Jack Lankin, my right winger, is another example. Jack’s about my age, but he has even more damaged cartilage in his knees than Gord. Otherwise, he’s Go rd’s opposite: five-seven, maybe one hundred and sixty pounds, and his neck wouldn’t look out of place in a chicken coop. Gord calls Jack the flabmeister because he’s never worked out a day in his life and lives on a diet of cheeseburgers and light beer. But he’s got softer hands than I have, he’s surpris ingly quick, and he’s a magician when he gets close to the net.
    Jack’s my tax accountant, and he’s a magician at that too. He’s also as gloomy as Gord is calm and cheerful. With the local economy what it is, sorting out people’s finances, I guess, is more depressing than dealing with