The Complete Screech Owls, Volume 2 Page 16

  “This!” Travis almost shouted. “How can you say you’ve already been scouted?”

  “Because I have. And you have, too, or don’t you remember Lake Placid?”

  Travis shook his head. “That was nothing. They weren’t NHL scouts.”

  “They were scouts, weren’t they? And everything ends up in the NHL eventually, doesn’t it?”

  “But they had nothing to do with the Leafs or the Ducks.”

  “Well, I like to think they did. Those are the teams I’d want to have scouting me, okay?”

  “And what do you mean you’re Paul Kariya’s cousin?”

  Nish shrugged. “Don’t get your shorts in a knot. He’s part Japanese, isn’t he?”

  “So?”

  “So, what do you think ‘Nishikawa’ is? French?”

  “And that makes you cousins?”

  “Sort of.”

  “‘Sort of ’? You can’t say that.”

  “I just filled it out as a joke,” Nish said. “How was I supposed to know what they were going to use those forms for? No one said anything about hockey cards that I remember.”

  “You can’t lie like that,” Travis insisted.

  Nish took a deep breath, gathering his thoughts. “I just exaggerated, that’s all. No one gets hurt by an exaggeration. Paul Kariya? He doesn’t even know, and he won’t know.”

  Travis stared out the window all the way back to the drop-off point where the Screech Owls were to meet the families they would be staying with for the tournament. Soon the bus began its slow, twisting climb up into the narrow streets of the Old City. They passed horse-drawn carriages, statues, old churches, and drew up to a hotel that looked more like a palace standing over the frozen river. Sarah and Jenny were at the windows taking pictures of it all, but Travis hardly even noticed.

  What if Nish was right? What if there was no harm in a little exaggeration? Maybe Nish did just mean it as a joke and Travis was letting his job as captain spoil his sense of humour.

  Or perhaps he was jealous that Nish’s card was attracting so much attention.

  Travis was secretly glad they wouldn’t be staying in this fancy hotel. He had never been inside a lobby quite so lovely as the one in the Château Frontenac, but he also felt that to feel comfortable here he’d need to be a member of royalty, not the captain of a peewee hockey team. It was too fancy, too special. Even the doorman intimidated the Owls, shooing them away from the entrance, where they had stopped to watch the hotel guests come and go in everything from stretch limousines to horse-drawn calèches.

  The Owls gathered in a large ballroom with two other teams. The players were all given pins and a warm welcome by one of the organizers, who told them they were very lucky this year, because their time in Quebec City would overlap with the Quebec Winter Carnival.

  They then met their billets. Travis, Nish, and Lars would all be guests of the Duponts, a family in which the parents spoke no English at all, but the children–Jean-Paul, a bantam player more than a year older than the three Owls, and Nicole, who was their age–were perfectly bilingual.

  “You can call me J-P,” Jean-Paul said as he shook Travis’s hand.

  “Thanks,” Travis said.

  “Bienvenue à Québec, Travis,” Nicole said to Travis, smiling and reaching out to shake his hand.

  “Merci,” he said, and felt a fool. He could say nothing else. Partly it was his lack of French. Partly it was Nicole. She was slim and pretty, with dark, shiny hair that fell over one cheek and had to be tossed back every so often.

  Nicole offered the same greeting to Nish, who blushed, and then to Lars, who bowed elegantly, causing Nicole to giggle.

  “Merci bien,” said Lars in a near-perfect French accent. “C’est une très belle ville, mademoiselle.”

  When Nicole had moved on, Nish and Travis pressed close to Lars.

  “Where did you learn to speak French?” Nish hissed.

  “I don’t know,” Lars answered, looking surprised at his friends’ reaction. “School when I was still in Sweden, I guess. It’s no big deal.”

  “How many languages do you speak, anyway?” Travis demanded.

  Lars laughed. “I never counted. But let me see: Swedish, German, a little Danish, a little Norwegian, English, of course, a bit of French…”

  “Et-gay a-ay ife-lay,” Nish said.

  Lars looked at him, dumbfounded. “What’s that?” he asked.

  “Pig Latin,” Nish said, triumphantly.

  “What’s it mean?”

  “Get a life!” Nish almost shouted.

  Travis couldn’t stop giggling. He hadn’t heard anyone use Pig Latin since grade school, but, if anyone would remember, it would be Nish.

  Travis was still laughing when Mr. Dillinger took his arm and pulled him aside.

  “Travis,” Mr. Dillinger said in a quiet voice. “The organizers are asking some of the team captains to keep a short daily diary for one of the newspapers. Muck and I thought you might do a good job. What do you say?”

  Travis didn’t know what to say. A diary?

  “In French?” Travis asked, feeling relief all of a sudden that his French was so weak.

  “No,” Mr. Dillinger said. “It’s an English paper from Montreal. Look, the reporter who’s putting the whole thing together is here. You meet with him, you can decide for yourself. Whatdya say?”

  “Yeah,” Travis said. “Sure.”

  But he didn’t feel sure. He knew it was the responsible Screech Owls captain answering Mr. Dillinger, not Travis Lindsay, who had never even written a letter in his entire life.

  “I’m Bart Lundrigan, Travis. Great to meet you.”

  Much to his surprise, Travis felt instantly at ease with the reporter. Bart Lundrigan was young, and he had a shock of dark curly hair that danced down into his eyes. He was wearing jeans and looked more like a movie star than a reporter.

  “I’m with the Montreal Inquirer, Travis. We’re not a very big paper, but we’re owned by one of the big chains, which means the stories I write could, conceivably, appear right across Canada.

  “The idea is this: a half-dozen of the team captains–players like yourself–are going to record their impressions each day in one of these pocket diaries”–the reporter held up a small red booklet–“and that is going to give fans a real insight into what it’s like to play in this tournament.

  “I want to know about the games, but I also want you to talk about coming here to Quebec to play. You know, what it’s like to play where Lafleur and Gretzky once played. What’s it mean to you? What do you think about the city? The people? Your billets? What kinds of things you do at the Carnival? You get the idea.”

  “Yeah, kind of.”

  “Good. Are you game, then?”

  Travis was still wary. “How much do I have to write?”

  The reporter laughed. “Not much. A page a day, if you can. I’ll drop around every now and then and read through whatever you’ve done. Deal?”

  Travis couldn’t resist the smile, couldn’t avoid the hand reaching out to shake his.

  “Deal,” he said.

  “Super,” Bart Lundrigan said. “I was sure hoping I’d get you; the Owls are one of the favourites in the C division, did you know that?”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “Well, that’s what they’re saying, anyway. Lot of excitement about this Wayne Nishikawa kid–Paul Kariya’s cousin, eh?”

  Travis swallowed hard. He didn’t know what to say. Was the reporter suspicious about Nish, or was he only making small talk?

  “Nish is a good defenceman,” Travis said, avoiding the actual question.

  The reporter nodded. He seemed satisfied.

  They talked a while longer. The reporter explained how he’d split up the diaries so everyone was represented: the West, Quebec, the Maritimes, an American team.

  They talked hockey as well. Bart Lundrigan’s dream was to cover an NHL team, preferably the Montreal Canadiens. He was, he said, not much different
from Travis himself: both of them dreaming of the NHL, one to play and one to report. They had lots in common, even if the reporter was a good ten years older than Travis.

  “I think this is going to be a great, great experience for you,” Lundrigan said.

  “I do, too,” said Travis.

  Travis was surprised he said this. But it was true. Fifteen minutes earlier, he had been dreading the idea of keeping a diary for everyone to read. Now he was looking forward to it.

  In a small way, he was going to be a reporter, too.

  The Duponts lived in a large bungalow well out of the Old City, on a street running down toward the ice-covered St. Lawrence River. The snowbanks were higher in this part of the city, much higher, and most of the houses had temporary canvas-and-aluminum “garages” to keep the snow off the cars, but apart from this nothing seemed out of the ordinary to the three boys in the back seat of the Duponts’ minivan. Travis had no idea what he had expected of his billets, but he was pleasantly surprised to walk into a home where he could smell cinnamon buns in the oven and “The Simpsons” had just come on the television.

  The difference was that Bart Simpson was speaking French–“I thought Bart was supposed to be a dummy!” Nish joked–but other than that, they could just as easily have been in a home down the street in their own town. The Duponts had a yappy black mutt they called Puck, frozen burritos for the microwave, and fights over the TV remote control.

  No one, however, had much interest in watching TV, for beyond the downstairs patio doors lay the finest backyard skating rink Travis had ever seen. There were spotlights off both ends of the house and, under the eaves, stereo speakers wired back into the house. The snowbanks were higher even than the boards at the Colisée, but it was the ice that most impressed the boys, so smooth it seemed to have been spread with a knife, not flooded each night with a green garden hose.

  “Je suis un artiste de la glace–le plus grand de tout le Québec,” Monsieur Dupont told them as he showed off his rink. He was grinning from ear to ear, his chest puffng out the bulky parka he wore as they all stepped outside.

  Travis turned to Nicole, who was rolling her eyes at her father’s bragging.

  “He says he’s Quebec’s greatest ice-making artist,” said Nicole. “It’s not even the best rink in the neighbourhood, for heaven’s sake.”

  The three boys all laughed. Monsieur Dupont stood waiting, wondering what his daughter had said to make their visitors laugh. “Quoi?” he asked her, and Nicole quickly said something reassuring to her father. Travis thought they had a nice relationship, father and daughter. He assumed Nicole had just told her father a slight fib, but where was the harm in that? He might have been upset if she had repeated exactly what she had said about his rink.

  There was a big difference, Travis thought, between holding back something that might be taken the wrong way and throwing something out that would for certain be taken the wrong way, like Nish and his “cousin,” Paul Kariya.

  “We’ll skate after we eat,” suggested Nicole.

  Travis felt a slight tremor go up his back. He had hoped for a chance to show how well he skated. He skated much better than he talked.

  They ate a wonderful meal, with fresh cinnamon buns for dessert. J-P and Nicole had a brief squabble about what music to skate to, and then they went down into the basement to get ready.

  Travis was first out the patio doors, and stopped dead in his tracks when he saw what was awaiting him. The rink, it seemed, had become a painting, a frozen island of colour surrounded by the pitch black of night. The ice sparkled and shone; there was even a red line painted across the middle of the rink for centre ice!

  He stepped out, glided on his left foot and pumped twice with his right, the little jump he always did when stepping onto fresh ice. He felt instantly at home. What a strange, wonderful country Canada was, he thought. People who can’t even talk to each other have a game that does it for them. From coast to coast they skate and play hockey, from the time they learn to walk until they’re older than Travis’s own father.

  Travis loved real ice. He loved the way his skates dug a little bit deeper than they ever did on artificial ice. He loved how, on a sharp turn, ice chips sometimes flew; on an indoor rink there would only be a slight spray of snow. He liked the way air felt outdoors: fresh and sharp on his face, more alive than anywhere else.

  Lars and Nish were also out now–Nish trying his fancy backwards skating around the nets at both ends, Lars just looping around slowly, taking it all in. He had a huge smile on his face.

  J-P was on the ice, and instantly there was a new sound in the air: the sizzle of weight. J-P was just big enough to have a big-league sound to his cornering, and when he came out of the corners, chips and spray flew behind him. The perfectly smooth surface, Monsieur Dupont’s magnificent creation, was being destroyed, but Travis knew it was with his blessing.

  There was another sound on the ice. Quick, sharp–the sound of Dmitri skating, Travis thought, although Dmitri wasn’t with them. He turned fast on his skates to move backwards so he could see. It was Nicole! She had on hockey skates, and she was whipping around so fast that Travis stumbled slightly as he shifted again to skate forward as she flew past. He hoped she hadn’t seen him nearly trip.

  They played a quick game of shinny: Anglos versus Francos. The two Duponts, with J-P’s size and Nicole’s speed, more than held their own against the three Owls–but then, Travis thought, this was their rink, they knew it as well as the inside of their house.

  Travis had the puck behind his net. He looked up and knew at once why he loved backyard shinny. No one cares. No one yells. No one corrects. Everyone was out of position. Everyone was simply playing.

  He began moving up ice just as J-P came in on him, the older boy skating fast to panic Travis. Travis saw Nish off to his right, waiting. He had only one play, the back pass. It was Travis’s favourite move in street hockey, and even though he’d often tried it in practice, he’d never dared it in a real game. It was too risky, too much a hot-dog play. Muck hated it, and blew the whistle every time Travis tried it in practice.

  But there were no whistles here. Travis moved to his left, then placed the puck on his backhand and whipped it, across ice, to Nish, who picked it up before J-P, whooping with surprise, was able to turn towards him. Nish instantly sent the puck back to Travis, who was free. He dug in deep, aware that J-P was chasing him. He could hear the growl of J-P’s skates, gaining ice on him.

  Nish was hammering the ice with his stick for a pass. Travis skated up to centre, faked the pass and laughed as Nicole fell for it, sliding on her knees between him and Nish, who was still tapping hard even though Travis was now home free. Travis ignored him, skated in on the empty net, and ripped a snapshot in off the crossbar.

  “C’est bon!” J-P shouted as he caught up to Travis. “Nice shot, Travis.”

  Far behind, Nicole slapped her stick on the ice in acknowledgement. It had been a nice shot, and it had gone in exactly as Travis had hoped.

  He felt something big brush past him. A shoulder knocked him slightly. It was Nish.

  “Puck hog!” Nish hissed as he skated by. It was a whisper, but one that shouted with anger.

  Travis smiled to himself. Of course: Nish had wanted to be the hero. He had wanted to roof the shot that won the admiration of the Duponts.

  “Let’s whip!” Nicole shouted.

  Nicole and J-P were stabbing their sticks into the snow nearest the patio doors. Then they cleared the nets off the ice, stacking them together at the far end. Travis and Nish and Lars stabbed their sticks into the snow too.

  Nicole skated up to Travis and took his hand in her mitten. She got Lars to hold on to Travis’s other hand, and J-P then took Lars’s free hand and reached for Nish.

  Around and around they skated, with Nicole leading the way. At every turn she built up speed until, finally, she all but stopped at centre ice and, holding on tightly to Travis, spun the line around her in an ever-fast
er circle, Nish at the far end gliding with the force of the spin.

  “Now!” Nicole shouted.

  J-P let go on his sister’s signal and Nish took off, flying.

  “AAAAAAAAAYYYYYYYYYYYYYEEEEEEEE!”

  The force of the “whip” sent him barrelling down the ice towards the largest snowbank, where he hit head first–and stuck!

  “HELLLLLLLPPPPPPPPPP!” came the muffled shout.

  Laughing wildly, the other four raced to pull Nish free. His face was covered in snow, and Travis could tell he was on the verge of blowing up, but Nicole took off her mittens and, very gently, brushed the snow out of his eyes.

  The snow on Nish’s face was melting fast, and Travis knew why; his friend’s cheeks were burning red. Not from anger. Not from embarrassment. From Nicole’s touch.

  Suddenly Travis understood why he had been called a puck hog. He knew Nish too well not to see he was smitten with Nicole.

  But then it hit Travis that so, too, was he.

  “Travis’s turn!” Nish announced.

  Travis was delighted to be next. They whipped him the same way, burying him to his shoulders, and Nicole also helped him with the snow, much to his delight.

  Travis couldn’t stop smiling.

  I have something to write about, he thought.

  “Dear Diary,” Travis wrote. He felt silly. He didn’t love this stupid little red vinyl book, but he felt that was the way you had to begin.

  Dear Diary,

  The Screech Owls are here in Quebec City for the most exciting tournament of our lives! We have already held one practice at the Colisée, which is the same rink where Wayne Gretzky and Mario Lemieux played when they were peewees just like us!

  We were told the story of how Guy Lafleur scored seven goals and they sewed seven velvet pucks on to his sweater for the next game. I’d love that to happen to me!

  Two neat things have already happened and we haven’t even played a game yet. The first was the hockey cards made for us by Upper Deck. They are just like the real NHL cards. I must have signed fifty of them today. The next was getting to stay with the Dupont family and skate on their outdoor rink, which is the best one any of us have ever seen. We played shinny and then played “whip,” which was a lot of fun.