Face-Off at the Alamo

  Text copyright © 2013 by Roy MacGregor

  Published in Canada by Tundra Books, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, One Toronto Street, Suite 300, Toronto, Ontario M5C 2V6

  Published in the United States by Tundra Books of Northern New York, P.O. Box 1030, Plattsburgh, New York 12901

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2012943702

  All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the publisher – or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency – is an infringement of the copyright law.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  MacGregor, Roy, 1948-

  Face-off at the Alamo / Roy MacGregor.

  (Screech Owls)

  eISBN: 978-1-77049-423-7

  I. Title. II. Series: MacGregor, Roy, 1948- . Screech Owls series.

  PS8575.G84F33 2013 jC813′.54 C2012-904860-7

  We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund and that of the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Media Development Corporation’s Ontario Book Initiative. We further acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program.

  www.tundrabooks.com

  v3.1

  For Fisher and Sadie Cation,

  the next generation …

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  About the Author

  1

  “Why don’t we see how many hockey sticks we can jam into that big yap of yours?”

  Travis Lindsay cringed. He’d watched this scene play out far too many times on road trips with the Screech Owls. Nish – Wayne Nishikawa, Travis’s sometimes-best, sometimes-worst friend on the team – would eventually push just a bit too far, until either Sarah or Sam had heard quite enough of the ridiculous chubby defenseman and his big mouth and one of them would turn on him.

  This time it was Sam: Samantha Bennett, the fiery, red-haired, peewee star who was every bit a match for Nish on the ice and, usually, more than a match off it.

  “Or why don’t we use your mouth at practice and see how many pucks we can dump into it?”

  There were times when Travis thought that his job as team captain was to make sure all the Screech Owls got along. But there were also times, he knew, when his job was to drag his pal Nish back down to earth.

  The peewee hockey team from little Tamarack in Canada had been filling in time between flights – a short layover in Chicago before heading on to San Antonio, Texas – when Nish went into one of his all-too-familiar sugar attacks. He was flying so high, Sarah suggested he wouldn’t even need a seat on the plane.

  In a way, it had partly been Data’s fault. Data – real name Larry Ulmar, though no one had called him that since kindergarten – was the team’s ultimate geek, a web surfer supreme who not only knew how to fix computers but seemed to have a hard drive installed between his ears. Ever since Data’s accident – struck by a drunk driver and unable to walk or skate since – Data had been serving as the team’s assistant coach and full time wireless guru. He helped run the team’s power play, but he also fixed the cell phones, downloaded the apps, programmed the laptops and various tablets and music players as well as running a Screech Owls website that would have been the envy of any club in the National Hockey League.

  Data had been using the Internet to find out all he could about their destination: San Antonio, Texas, home of the San Antonio Peewee Invitational hockey tournament. It wasn’t long before he came across a link that took him to San Antonio’s Ripley’s Believe It or Not – just across the street from the Alamo, the famous fort where Davy Crockett had fought and died, and where many believe the American love of freedom was born. Data got so excited about the Ripley’s exhibition he forgot all about the Alamo. He called Travis and the rest of the Owls over, and almost instantly he’d been bumped off his own tablet and Nish was drooling over the screen like a big dog over a barbecued steak.

  “They got a wax museum there, too!” the big defenseman shouted, his face squeezing into that red-tomato look Travis had come to recognize as a warning light. Something was coming. Something totally wacko. Something totally Nish.

  In an instant, Nish’s thick fingers were flicking through shots of the famous characters in the waxworks and he was shouting out their names as if only he was capable of recognizing the celebrities.

  “Michael Jackson!

  “Marilyn Monroe!

  “The President!

  “Elvis!”

  And that, of course, was what really got him going. If his great hero, Elvis Presley, could be a wax figure in San Antonio, Nish figured he should be, too.

  “By the time I get named tournament MVP,” Nish loudly boasted, “they’ll be measuring me up for my wax statue!”

  Travis could see Sam shaking her head in disgust. But Nish wasn’t finished.

  “It’s perfect!” he screeched. “I’ll be in Ripley’s Believe It or Not for my amazing play in this tournament. And I’ll be a wax celebrity with my pal Elvis. San Antonio is my kind of town!”

  Nish soon had all the Owls going through the Ripley’s website. They snorted at the man with the world’s largest nose – “You’d need a backhoe to pick that monster!” shouted Andy Higgins – and they stared in amazement at the man with the world’s biggest eyes. They argued over whether some of the claims were real – the two-headed calf, the half man, the bearded lady – and they squirmed uncomfortably when they looked at the Lizard Man, with his green skin and surgically split tongue.

  When they saw photographs of the man from India who had let the fingernails of one hand grow to more than twenty feet long, Sam pretended to put her fingers – nails bitten to the quick – down her throat to make herself throw up. When they saw the man who was able to lift more than a hundred pounds – just about the weight of the average Screech Owl – using only his ears, several of the Owls covered the sides of their heads as if they were being pulled up into a tree by nothing but their earlobes.

  It didn’t take long for Nish to see an opening for himself – an opening as big as his troublesome mouth.

  “Here’s a world record I can get!” he announced.

  The team crowded around Data’s little computer and stared at a page about Jim Purol, “the World’s Biggest Mouth.”

  “Perfect!” sneered Sam.

  “The record’s already yours,” teased Sarah.

  The story about Purol was bizarre. He had set twenty-three world records, more than anyone else. He had set his historic twenty-third record at the Rose Bowl football stadium when he sat in 39,250 seats in two days. But that wasn’t what interested Nish, who had never been known to sit still long enough to keep count.

  “151 straws!” Nish shouted. “151? I can beat that, easy!”

  Travis had no idea what Nish was yapping about. He pushed his way through the gathering to see for himself. There was a YouTube video of Jim Purol stuffing more drinking straws into his mouth than you’d find at your local McDonald’s.

  “I can do it!” Nish said. “Help me collect some straws!”

  And so began the Great Straw Hunt at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport. Under Nish’s direction, the Owls set off from the loading gate toward the food court area, where each one stepped up to the various fast-food outlets – MCD’S, Wendy’s, DQ, a half-dozen others – to pretend they’d neglected to pick up a straw with their meal and took as many as three or four at a time.

  They made their way back to the gate and huddled in a corner well away from Muck Munro, the team’s coach, and Mr. Dillinger, the manager, who were drinking coffee and playing a game of hearts to pass the time until they boarded the plane to San Antonio.

  As each of the Owls unwrapped the straws he or she had picked up and passed them on to Fahd Noorizadeh, the team’s little defenseman, Nish lay flat on his back on a row of seats, mouth open wide as a garbage can. One by one, Fahd placed the straws into Nish’s big mouth while the other Owls kept count.

  “Forty!” Fahd announced triumphantly after several minutes.

  “Uhhmmmm!” Nish shouted, sounding as if his mouth had been duct-taped over.

  “Fifty!”

  “Fifty-five!”

  “Fifty-six!”

  “Seven!”

  “Eight!”

  “Uhhhhmmmmmmmmmm!” Nish shouted, his eyes bulging.

  “Fifty-NINE!” Fahd called out, shaking his head. “That’s it, folks, the World’s Biggest Mouth is full up!”

  “Wow,” said Sam with great sarcasm, “only ninety-three short! The world record is just about yours, Big Mouth!”

  Nish sputtered and spat, the straws flying out of his mouth and onto the seats an
d floor all around the Owls.

  “No fair!” he shouted when he’d spat the last one out. “These straws are fatter than what that guy used.”

  “The only thing fat around here is you,” said Sam. “As in, fat chance!”

  Nish glared at her, his eyes mere slits in his beet-red face.

  Travis couldn’t help himself. He started to giggle.

  2

  It had been a long off-season. Muck’s rules for the Screech Owls were unbreakable. He alone among the coaches in the Tamarack area would have nothing to do with summer hockey. He said summer was for families, not just kids. The Screech Owls should try other sports in the summer, he told them. He had this theory that all games feed into each other and help each other. Play soccer, he would say, and see how it’s possible to attack by first turning back. Play lacrosse, he would say, and find out for yourself what magic Wayne Gretzky discovered when he went behind the net to make his plays. Play baseball, and learn the art of bunting – it’s not that far from tipping shots from the point in hockey.

  Travis had spent the early part of his summer playing soccer and lacrosse, and then passed the entire month of August at his grandparents’ cottage in the north. He went wakeboarding almost every day and mastered both the “360” and the full flip – how, he wondered to himself, would Muck apply those two skills to hockey? – and he had fished and canoed and swam and eaten more s’mores and burnt marshmallows around the campfire than he could count. He figured he must have finally put some weight on his small frame and was disappointed to return home to Tamarack, hop on his mother’s bathroom scale, and discover he was exactly the same 103 pounds he had been when the family left for the cottage. He felt stronger, though, and was already looking forward to the new season with the Owls.

  It seemed forever since he had skated. At one point, he went down into the basement and dressed himself in his full hockey gear. It felt so strange, as he dragged his equipment out of the storage bin, that he wondered if he could even recall how to dress, let alone play.

  And yet the moment Travis placed that first pad over his right shin, it all came flooding back. He had once read that you never forget, no matter how old you are, how to ride a bicycle or how to swim, and he knew it was the same for getting dressed for hockey. Over the years, he had developed a ritual. First right shin pad, then left. Then jock and garter belt pulled up over the shin pads. Socks on next – first right, then left – then attach the tops to the Velcro strips on the garter. Then hockey pants, but never done up right away: fly tie left open, shoulder straps left hanging.

  It was such a strange routine to go through. Travis felt like he was inhaling his hockey equipment, sucking in familiar smells that his mother could never wash out completely at the end of the season. He pulled on his shoulder pads and breathed deeply. Then his elbow pads, first right elbow, then left. He put on his neck guard, convinced his neck was thicker – a sure sign he would be a stronger player this year. He had always been quick, always sneaky, always able to read the play and see the ice as well as anyone else on the team – Sarah Cuthbertson excepted – but he desperately wished he could be stronger in the corners, tougher on face-offs, and have a harder shot. If he could only fire the puck like Dmitri Yakushev – Dmitri of the patented backhander that sent the opposing goaltender’s water bottle flying through the air and into the glass back of the net every time – then he would be the complete player: Travis Lindsay, NHL-bound.

  Next, he tried on his skates. They had their own particular smell – a touch of plastic, a hint of steel – but they felt like cement blocks. Feet that had gone bare most of the summer suddenly were crammed in tight. Had they grown? In a way, he hoped not – these Eastons were the best skates he had ever worn – in another way, he couldn’t help but hope he had got a bit bigger.

  He tied them tight. The skates felt impossibly awkward. They always did at the start of a new season. Travis had a theory that your real hockey season arrived the moment you ceased to think about skating and it just happened, with the skates becoming natural extensions of your own skin and bone. The moment you no longer thought about playing, you really were playing. For Travis, this feeling came about a month into the season, a few weeks after the first tryouts and a week or two after the first league game. From then on, he was a player.

  He pulled his Screech Owls practice jersey over his head and paused, as always, to kiss the crest just as it passed by his mouth. He wouldn’t feel right if he didn’t do this each time he dressed. He knew how silly it might appear to anyone who saw, but no one ever saw, and the only person he had ever told was Sarah, who admitted to the same silly ritual.

  Next came the helmet – the inside filled with smells as familiar as the rink itself. He could almost see the Zamboni sliding slightly on the final turn of a fresh flood.

  He put on his gloves, spat on them both, as they felt dry and cumbersome. He picked up his stick – his first full graphite, still like new, though he had used it since he got it last Christmas from his grandparents – and leaned over as if he had finally reached the NHL and was posing for his rookie hockey card.

  He felt awkward. He felt encased and enclosed after a summer of total freedom. How, in a single week, could he possibly have gone from a bathing suit to this suit of armor? He felt he wouldn’t be able to skate. The stick felt all wrong in his hands, the gloves dry and stubborn as he tried to grip the stick.

  Travis laughed. He knew this moment well. He always tried his hockey equipment on at the end of summer. It always felt completely wrong. And it always felt completely right the instant he took his first step out on the ice, his skates digging in on that first corner of freshly flooded ice and his ankle flicking to send a spray of still-unfrozen water.

  He could hardly wait to get going.

  Tryouts had gone as expected. Muck and Mr. Dillinger had their team – the same players as last season. They liked it just the way it was and weren’t keen on change. Muck had so many theories, Travis had trouble remembering some of them, but one he would never forget was Muck’s belief that a good team beat good players. Several times he had seen Muck and Mr. Dillinger look impressed by a new player who came out and showed great skill on the ice, only to cut the player after a couple of practices. Be selfish with the puck and you wouldn’t become an Owl. Take stupid penalties and you wouldn’t be an Owl. Be a “hot dog” – which sounded like a swear word the way Muck said it – and you would never, ever join the Owls.

  None of this, of course, explained how Nish kept his position on Muck Munro’s Screech Owls. Nothing Travis could think of explained Wayne Nishikawa. All Travis knew for certain was that, for all the trouble that Nish caused, when the crunch came in an important game, the big defenseman with the beet-red face and the hockey puck for a brain would be there. And could be counted on.

  Camp ended and the Owls played a couple of exhibition games against a good peewee team from Buffalo – the junior Sabres – before beginning their season. It was just before Thanksgiving that Mr. Dillinger sent the note out to the Screech Owls’ parents that soon had the team talking about nothing else.

  The Owls had been invited to the San Antonio Peewee Invitational – and Mr. Dillinger and Muck were both recommending that the team should go. Muck pitched the trip as “educational.” The tournament had been set up to include guided tours of the Alamo, and the championship team was to get the opportunity to spend the night camped out in the world’s most famous fort.

  Muck, a history buff, couldn’t resist. The Screech Owls’ coach would be in heaven in San Antonio.

  But he had no idea how close he would come to going to heaven for good.

  3

  The Screech Owls landed at San Antonio International Airport on the Thursday morning leading into the Thanksgiving holiday. The airports had been packed – Thanksgiving being the biggest travel weekend in the American year – and the Owls were happy to get out onto the open road again for the bus ride into the city.

  If the Owls’ world was a coin, it felt as if someone had flipped it. They had left in sleet – their flight out was delayed while ground crew de-iced the wings – and landed in sun so strong they could have fried eggs on the wings of the big US Airways jet that brought them to a halt at the airport terminal. They had left a world of high hills, deep bush, and freshwater lakes and landed in virtual desert, the ground brown and dusty, the hills low and rolling, the sky seeming to stretch on forever without meeting the horizon. Trees were the exception here, whereas back in Tamarack they were so much the rule that the town had been named after one.