Travis was still blotting shaving cream from his hair as the pines gave way and the van began climbing up through a twisting string of motels and motor inns, past a Burger King and McDonald’s, up and over a hill and down onto the main street of Lake Placid. They were finally here. The six-hour drive was forgotten. The shaving cream was forgotten. Travis was as wide awake and alert as he would be if the team was just waiting for the Zamboni to finish flooding the ice so the game could begin.

Lake Placid was alive with cars and campers and people. It was still early spring yet it felt like an Ontario tourist town at the height of the season. Traffic barely moved. Shoppers wove through the cars as if the street were a parking lot and the stoplights meaningless. It felt like summer to Travis, after a winter of heavy boots and thick jackets and shovelling snow.

There was a banner stretched high across the street. “WELCOME TO LAKE PLACID’S SIXTH ANNUAL INTERNATIONAL PEEWEE HOCKEY CHAMPIONSHIP.” “International”–the word made it seem impossible, more like one of his dreams than reality.

Travis had been playing hockey for six seasons–tyke, novice, atom, and now peewee–and he had got much better each year, if not much bigger. In tyke, with his dad the coach, Travis had started the season holding on to the back of a stacking chair so he wouldn’t fall, and he had finished the season the best skater on the team after Sarah Cuthbertson, who had, they all joked, an unfair advantage in her mother.

He knew why: he was the one kid who skated every day–or at least every chance he got–in the open-air rink behind the school. And when he wasn’t on the rink, he was in his basement, stickhandling tennis balls across the concrete and firing pucks against a big plywood board his father had bought and attached to the wall.

Travis Lindsay was hockey-crazy. His favourite team was the Detroit Red Wings. He had all the cards from the recent years–Steve Yzerman and Sergei Fedorov–but the Detroit team of his dreams played back in the 1950s, thirty years before he was even born, when “Terrible Ted” Lindsay and “Mr. Hockey,” Gordie Howe, were the superstars.

Travis’s grandfather had once told him that Ted Lindsay was a distant cousin, which made him an even more distant cousin of Travis’s–but a cousin all the same. The same name, the same skills…the same size. Ted Lindsay had not been big, either, but he had ended up being known as “Terrible Ted” and was in the Hockey Hall of Fame. “Terrible Travis” didn’t sound quite as good, but it was the way Travis secretly liked to think of himself.

He had been through house league. He had played on the atom competitive team for a jerk named Mr. Spratt who called them by their last names and insisted on being called “Coach.” He wore a suit while he worked the bench in tournaments–even chewed ice like an NHL coach. He used to scream at the kids until they cried. With his parents’ blessing, Travis had quit and gone back to house league.

And then he had tried competitive again. With Muck.

Muck Munro was so unlike “Coach” Spratt that it hardly seemed they played the same game. Muck didn’t yell. He laughed at the first player who called him “Coach.” He didn’t wear suits during games, didn’t wear matching track outfits for practices.

According to Guy Boucher’s dad, Muck had been a pretty fine junior player at one time, but he had so severely broken his leg in a game that he had had to quit hockey altogether. He still walked with a slight limp.

But Travis could see the ability whenever Muck came out onto the ice with them. He had to favour his bad leg a bit, but Travis had never heard a sweeter sound in his life than when Muck went out onto the still-wet ice and took a few long strides down the rink and into the turn, his skates sizzling like bacon in a frying pan as they dug in and flicked out into the next stride.

Travis had tried to listen to his own skating, but all he could hear was the chop when his blades hit. Nothing smooth, nothing sizzling. He figured he had neither the stride nor the weight. He was too small to sound like Muck.

Muck put the team together. He was the one who got Barry Yonson and Ty Barrett to come on as assistants. Barry had played junior “B” the year before, quitting to concentrate on his school work, but Muck figured, correctly, that Barry missed his ice time and invited him out to help with the team. Barry was great: a big, curly-haired guy with a constant gap-toothed smile and the ability to slap a puck–in the air!–all the way from his own blueline over the net and against the glass at the far end.

Ty Barrett was a bit older but had also once played for Muck. He worked as an assistant manager at the Tim Horton donut shop and every time they had an early practice he would bring in a box of still-warm Timbits he had picked up on the way to the rink. Though heavy-set and a weak skater, Ty was great at organizing drills. He made them fun, always with the two sides competing against each other for first grabs at the Timbits.

It had been Muck who got Mr. Dillinger to be the team manager and trainer, and that had worked out wonderfully, as well. Mr. Dillinger kept the dressing room loose. He drove the van to the tournaments. He organized the pizza, the pop, the wedgie stops. Travis had never had so much fun playing on a team in his life.

This is it!” Mr. Dillinger shouted as the van groaned up one more hill and swept into the parking lot of the Holiday Inn. It was a Holiday Inn unlike any they had seen before. Sun Spree Resort, it called itself, with a putting green out front, nature trails, a big indoor pool, a Jacuzzi hot tub, an arcade, and, straight back down the hill, the Olympic Center hockey rink. The teams could practically roll out of bed into their dressing rooms.

“Awwwww-righhhhtttt!” all twelve Screech Owls shouted. Nish pumped a fat fist out the side window.

They piled out of the van and into the hotel. Muck was already there, waiting, with his usual Diet Coke in his right hand. Spread out before him on a small table were a dozen or so white envelopes with names and numbers on them.

“Good drive?” Muck asked.

“One close shave,” Mr. Dillinger answered. “Right, Travis?”

Mr. Dillinger laughed so hard two women checking in turned to stare, but he didn’t care. Travis turned red.

“Check the envelopes,” Muck said to the new arrivals. “You’ll find your roomies and two keys per room. Soon as you find your rooms you can go on up.”

Travis was in with Nish, Wilson, and Data. He couldn’t have picked better roommates if the choosing had been left to him.

“One more thing,” Muck announced as the players scrambled for their keys. “Don’t even try to watch the adult movies on your TVs. We’ve had the front desk disengage the pay channels for the whole tournament. Understand, Nish?”

 

Nish kept them up until midnight trying, unsuccessfully, to re-wire the television so he could watch the forbidden movies. It had taken Travis a long time to fall asleep. He was just too excited about the tournament. It wasn’t his fear of the dark–he’d solved that by going last to the bathroom and then “for-getting” to turn off the light, leaving the door open barely a crack. None of the other boys had complained.

By 6:30 a.m. he was wide awake again. Wide awake and anxious. He checked to see if anyone else was awake. Nish was rolled in his sheets like a tortilla, the only fragment of flesh exposed a single big toe sticking free at the bottom. Wilson, on the other hand, had nothing over him, since Nish had yanked all the blankets to his side during the night, and was rolled up in a ball like a baby. Data was snoring slightly, breathing like an old Klingon.

Travis went into the washroom and wet three washcloths with water as cold as it would run. He squeezed them out and then brought them back into the bedroom where he dropped one on each face and, in the case of Nish, over his big toe.

“Whaaaaa?” called Wilson, who bolted straight up.

“Jach!” shouted Data. He even dreamed in Klingon!

Nish didn’t stir.

“C’mon, guys,” Travis said to the others. “We got an eight o’clock practice.”

“I don’t have to practise any more,” Wilson argued. “I can’t get any better.”

“Come on, Wils–you want to play in the Olympics, you better find out how slow you are on an Olympic ice surface.”

Growling, Wilson threw his pillow at Travis and rolled out of bed. Data was already up and moving. Wilson and Travis jumped simultaneously onto Nish, squashing the Tortilla.

“Hey!” Nish shouted, trapped by his blankets. “Bug off!”

Nish began to twist violently, going nowhere. Wils sat on his head, lifted his arm and, with his open hand cupped under his armpit, made a loud farting noise that caused Nish to twist and scream until he bounced right off the bed onto the floor.

With Nish furiously staring up, Wils once again let one rip from his armpit, with everyone laughing at poor Nish, who’d taken the sound for something else.

“Jerk,” said Nish.

“Let’s go,” Travis said.