Muck made sure there would be no distractions that night. He talked to the hotel manager and was able to arrange for a separate room in the quieter west wing for the two girls. He and the coaches of the other teams staying at the hotel had the front desk cut off pizza deliveries to that wing at 10:00 p.m. He made the girls go to bed by 8:00 p.m.
Travis and several other members of the team walked down the hill and onto Main Street to see the sights. Travis, Nish, Data, Willie, Derek, Wilson, Zak, and Dmitri kept to one group and others took off in their own little groups. They were too many to stick entirely together, though some would have preferred to. Travis could never understand why some wanted to do everything as a team. He thought eight was more than enough–more than would ever be on the ice together at the same time.
Nish, of course, wanted to buy a T-shirt. He had a shirt from every tournament trip they had ever been on: Niagara Falls, Muskoka, Montreal, Ottawa, Peterborough, London–Ontario, not England. One size extra-large, and Nish was content for the rest of the trip.
His parents had given him twenty dollars to buy the shirt. It was all he had, fortunately, for if they’d given Nish a hundred he would have come back to the hotel wearing Lake Placid sweat pants, a T-shirt, wrist sweatbands, a sweatshirt with a hood, and, what he seemed to like best, a baseball cap with two big doggie doos, plastic and odourless, mercifully, perched over the brim. If something was truly disgusting, then Nish would want it.
It was cool, Main Street feeling more as if it were down in a dark basement than high in the mountains. But the sun was set now and the only light came from the streetlights. A breeze was blowing in off the lake and seeming colder every time it rippled their jackets. Travis had his Screech Owls windbreaker on and wished he had a sweater beneath. It was strange being up this high: summer in the day, winter at night.
Nish got his T-shirt at one of the trinket shops backing onto Mirror Lake. At $17.99 Travis and the others felt he’d been ripped off, but Nish was delighted with the shirt. It had the Olympic rink and the 1980 Team U.S.A. pictured on it, and “The Impossible Dream” written above “Lake Placid, N.Y.” Travis told him it looked like the T-shirt was made before Nish was born, but Nish just gave him a huge raspberry, patted the bag that was holding the shirt, and headed back out the door, mission accomplished.
He stopped at a turning display tray.
“Hey! Look at that!”
Travis and the others stopped, stared, saw nothing.
“nuq?” Data asked. (“What?”)
Nish reached out his free hand. “This!” He had a small plastic tool kit in his hands.
“You want a toy now?” Willie asked sarcastically.
“Naw. Look at it. It’s perfect!”
Everyone looked. Everyone saw a child’s tool kit: screwdriver, pliers, adjustable wrench. So cheap they’d probably break first turn. All in a plastic case for $3.99.
“I could fix our TV,” Nish said.
“There’s nothing wrong with our TV,” Travis said.
Nish looked at him, shook his head in pity. “They cut off our movies, didn’t they?”
“You’ve never even seen one,” Travis countered, defensively.
“Which is why we need these tools,” Nish said, plucking the package free of the case. “C’mon, a buck apiece.”
“No way,” said Travis.
“I got a buck,” Data said.
“I got fifty cents,” said Zak.
“Me, too,” said Dmitri.
Nish turned to Willie. “You in?”
“It’s stupid,” Willie said.
“You in?” Nish repeated.
“I guess.”
They pooled their money and Nish paid. Travis felt uneasy, as if they were buying cigarettes or something else they shouldn’t have. But it felt weird to be uneasy over a child’s tool kit.
Travis, Nish, and the others walked up and down both sides of the street. They saw the old wooden toboggan-run down by the water. They saw the little bandshell in the park. The movie theatre, the dozens of T-shirt and souvenir shops, the art galleries, the arcade, the frozen yogurt outlets not yet opened for the tourist season.
Data bought a pin and, for his mom, a silver spoon saying “Lake Placid, N.Y.” for her collection. Zak Adelman bought hockey cards, but the best he could come up with was a Pavel Bure that Willie, the world’s expert in everything, said was worth ten dollars, and a Martin Brodeur that was supposed to be worth eight dollars and, according to the latest Beckett Hockey Monthly, was “hot.”
Travis bought nothing and kept walking. He didn’t bother arguing with Willie, but Travis was beginning to have his doubts about trading cards. He’d collected all through novice and atom and at the beginning of peewee, but one day he had walked into a card store and suddenly just lost interest. Simple as that. Just completely lost interest.
Travis figured he’d been spending an average of three dollars a week buying cards–usually one lousy pack!–and while he did have a hardcover collection of Mario Lemieux and Wayne Gretzky (autographed!) and Adam Oates and Teemu Selanne and Sergei Fedorov and Mike Richter and Adam Graves and Pierre Turgeon and Alexei Yashin and Radek Bonk and, of course, Bure, the favourite, he had about 10,000 cards in a big box that meant nothing to him and nothing to anyone else, either.
Besides, he’d started to wonder whether or not they were really worth anything at all. Right from the start his dad had said the whole collecting thing was “a house of cards,” which, according to his mother, meant it was phoney, not real, and while Travis had periodically got testy over his father’s continuing cracks about the real value of cards, he was beginning to think his father might be right after all.
Just for fun, Travis had tried to sell about a half-dozen of his better cards. He picked out the autographed Gretzky, a few Donruss Ice Kings, some Ultra award winners and a Patrick Roy and Eric Lindros from the Topps Gold Series, and took them to a flea market where a number of dealers had tables set up.
“Would you like to buy these?” Travis had asked each one in turn.
And each one in turn had done exactly the same thing: taken the dozen or so cards, walked through them with their fingers, checking, and then handed every one of them back, including the Gretzky. “Don’t need ’em,” the dealers would say. At first this made sense to Travis, but after a while he was wondering if, in fact, “Don’t need ’em” meant “Don’t want them,” and that what they were really saying was that the cards weren’t worth anything to them or to him. According to the Beckett, the Lindros Topps Gold was worth thirty-five to forty-five dollars, but he couldn’t even get a sniff of interest from the flea-market dealers.
He took the same cards in to the local card store, a little store run by a kind, elderly man who sometimes threw in a free card or a hardcover or, once in a while, even a free monthly Beckett magazine so Travis could look up the values of his cards.
“I’d like to cash these in,” Travis said, handing the cards over.
The man, smiling, took the cards and examined them, just like the men had done at the flea market. “You’ve got some dandies here,” he told Travis.
“They’re worth a total of $86.50,” Travis said. According to Beckett.
The man smiled. “I’m sure they are,” he said. “But we’re not buying right now, Travis.”
Travis felt dizzy. Three years of three bucks a week–nearly five-hundred-dollars’ worth of cards at home, and nobody “needs” them and nobody’s “buying right now”?
“Tell you what,” the man said. “I’ll swap you these for this Fedorov group. Deal?”
Travis took the deal. But he also took the hint. Cards were worth cards; they weren’t worth money. They had next to no value at all to anyone except for the kids foolish enough to hand over their allowance.
From that day on, he was, at best, a casual collector. He knew now what his dad had meant when he called the whole thing “a house of cards.”
“nuqDaq Derek?” Data asked. (“Anyone see Derek?”)
The group stopped at the corner, Travis about to step off the curb. He hadn’t even been thinking of keeping track of everyone. But they’d been warned by Muck to stick together when they went out. And now Derek was missing.
“Maybe he went back to the hotel,” Willie suggested.
“Why would he?” Nish giggled. “I have the TV tools right here.”
“This isn’t funny,” Travis said. “We have to find him.”
They backtracked and began checking the stores they’d wandered through. No Derek. Finally Wilson pointed across the street.
“There’s something we missed!” he shouted. It seemed he’d forgotten Derek. He was pointing to an arcade, the lights flashing inside. The group broke into a run, Nish causing a driver to slam on his brakes and shake a fist at him. Nish shook his fist back and made like a dog barking as the car shot by.
Derek was inside. He’d seen the lights and wandered off. And when they found him, he was so deep into a game of “Mortal Combat” that he didn’t even notice his teammates surrounding him to watch.
But that was Derek. Serious to a fault. Different from his father. Travis sometimes wondered if perhaps Mr. Dillinger had too much personality for Derek to deal with. Maybe he took up so much room that Derek had become a bit of a quiet loner in reaction. And yet they had in common their love of hockey. Derek worked so hard at it and Mr. Dillinger, obviously, was very proud of him. Mr. Dillinger was always kidding about when Derek would make the Leafs and how he would have free season’s tickets to Maple Leaf Gardens.
The boys became so caught up watching Derek play they forgot they’d ever lost him. Soon Nish was bumming more money from the rest of the players so he could join in on the fun, too.
Travis had only five dollars, and he knew if he cashed it in on tokens he’d be five dollars short in about five minutes. So he held on and watched. Data had ten dollars’ worth of tokens and, as usual, Nish was more than happy to borrow. They played air hockey and pool. They shot baskets. And, of course, they played video games, games so violent his mother would have marched him right out if she’d seen what they were doing to each other. At one point Nish’s character hit Travis’s character so hard he split in half and blood gushed all over the screen and the screen flashed, “Place token in now for extra game. Place token in now for extra game.” But Nish was out of tokens.
The Screech Owls left in a group, Derek with them, and turned back down toward the hotel, prepared to call it a night. The streets were still filled with people, and Travis could tell the hockey crowd from the locals easily. The locals didn’t look around. They knew where they were going. The hockey crowd was obvious: the jackets and caps, the way kids shouted across the street to each other, the way the parents awkwardly hung around in groups. Why they all felt they had to be friends when some of their children didn’t even like all their own teammates baffled Travis.
He was tired and the jostling crowds were getting to him. Doors to restaurants and shops and bars were opening and closing on so many different sounds that he felt more that he was in a midway than a small town. He’d be glad to get back to his bed. He hoped Nish’s cheap tools broke on the first try.
Travis was walking along only half paying attention when, suddenly, he pitched face-first out over the curb and onto the road, a car braking and squealing as the driver yanked the steering wheel hard and away from his sprawling body.
The impact knocked Travis’s breath out, so he had no voice to add to what he could hear behind him.
“What the hell was that for?” Nish was shouting.
There were other voices, unfamiliar.
“Get a life, fatso!”
“C’mon, runt! Get on your feet!”
“What’s the matter? Need your girl here to do your fighting, too?”