Muck would be pleased, Travis knew, as the Screech Owls assembled by the entrance to the tent and awaited the arrival of their coach. Travis had taken special care in combing his hair. He had moved the blond curl back off his forehead. It made him look older, he thought, more mature. More like a team captain.
They were all there. Wilson and Andy the tallest, by far. Gordie Griffth still managing to look like a little boy and a skinny teenager at the same time. Sarah with her blonde hair in a neat ponytail. Jenny with her flame-red hair shining like it had sparkles in it. Dmitri with his hair slicked down, and Lars with his hair so light and dry it seemed like it might bounce off his head just from walking. And Nish, of course, wearing his beloved Mighty Ducks of Anaheim cap.
“You hoping they’ll mistake you for Paul Kariya?” Sarah kidded.
“Very funny,” Nish said, but refused to remove the cap. Travis understood why. It had, after all, been given to Nish by Paul Kariya at the end of the Quebec International Peewee Tournament, and Nish had hardly taken if off since. It was, for him, the symbol of his greatest moment on the ice–he’d scored the winning goal–and his greatest moment off the ice, as well. He had met his great hero, Paul Kariya. And Kariya had forgiven Nish for letting on that they were “cousins” just because they were both of Japanese heritage.
Muck came along with Mr. Dillinger, the team manager, and Mr. Dillinger was pushing Data in his fancy new wheelchair. Data looked great. His dark hair was combed perfectly and he had put on his new blazer with the Screech Owls logo over the heart. It was amazing what Data could do with a single hand: loop a tie, button his cuffs, tie his shoes, practically anything that anyone else could do with two. Data, the electronics nut, had a video camera small enough to hold in his one good hand, and was using it to sweep the scene, lingering on each player as he recorded their first day in Nagano.
Both Muck and Mr. Dillinger were in suits, but Mr. Dillinger, his happy red face grinning, his bald head shining, looked far more at ease in his fancy clothes than did Muck. Muck kept pulling at his collar, and he kept scratching the top of his legs as if the pants itched him. But if Muck didn’t much care for how he was dressed, he seemed to like what he saw in his team. His only adjustment was to pluck the Mighty Ducks cap off Nish and slam it into his stomach before announcing it was time to go in to the opening banquet.
The Owls were put at the same table as the Olympians, the peewee team from Lake Placid. The Olympians were wearing beautiful red-white-and-blue tracksuits, the U.S. flag emblazoned across the back with the Olympic symbol and “1980” stitched on beneath. The Owls knew that 1980 was pretty much a sacred year in Lake Placid–the year the home team, the United States, had won the Olympic gold medal.
There were more than a dozen teams crammed into the tent. There were the two teams from North America, at least ten from Japan, and even two from China, where hockey was just beginning to be played.
The teams were shy of each other, but gradually they began to mingle as they were prodded by their coaches and the tournament organizers. Nish made a great show of bowing to various members of the Japanese teams, who giggled shyly into their hands and bowed back. The Japanese all seemed to have their own cards–kid versions of the business cards Travis’s dad sometimes gave out–and Nish seemed to be the only North American player there with cards to hand back: hockey cards of NHL stars, usually, but also a few of his treasured “Wayne Nishikawa” cards from the Quebec International Peewee Tournament. Nish was a huge hit, with his Japanese looks and his treasured Mighty Ducks cap, which was now back on his head. One by one, Japanese players lined up to try on the cap that had been given to Nish “by the great Paul Kariya himself–my cousin.”
Muck and Mr. Dillinger were invited to the head table. Sho Fujiwara, recognizing a hockey man like himself in Muck, did a quick switch of the place cards that indicated the seating arrangements so that they could sit together and talk–and Muck seemed to be having a wonderful time of it in this strange, foreign country where his game served as the common language. At one point, Travis even noticed Muck showing Sho a break-out pattern by using the water glasses and salt and pepper shakers to illustrate the Owls’ game plan.
Sho opened the ceremonies with a hilarious account of his own experiences as the Japanese goaltender for the 1960 Winter Olympics in Squaw Valley, California. In Japanese, and then English, he told the kids what it was like to be on the very first hockey team that ever played for Japan, and the pressure they were under. They sailed across the Pacific rather than flew, so they’d have time to work on new skills on the way across. “Not stickhandling,” he said with a wide smile, “but learning how to eat with a knife and fork.”
He soon had the kids screaming with laughter. Each member of the Japanese team had been issued an official Japanese Olympic team shirt and tie for the trip, and they had worn them each day aboard the ship as it had made its way across the ocean, practising three meals a day to do without the traditional chopsticks and eat with the knives and forks they would be expected to use in North America. “We landed in Vancouver,” he said. “First thing we all did was go out and buy a new shirt and tie each. Our official ones we had to throw away, we’d spilled so much food on them!”
Sho then introduced the head table. Besides Muck and Mr. Dillinger and the head of the Lake Placid and the Chinese teams, the mayor of Nagano was present, as was the head of the service club from Tamarack, the head of the local sports federation, and a few local businessmen, including Mr. Ikura, the man who owned the largest of the nearby ski resorts, who stood to extend an invitation to all the teams to come to his hill for a day of skiing and snowboarding–“free of charge”–before the end of the tournament. He was, of course, cheered wildly.
After the introductions, they served the food. Nish insisted he was going to eat his with chopsticks, and made a grand gesture of getting his sticks ready and pushing away the knife and fork that had also been laid out at his plate.
“What’s this?” demanded the Japanese expert as the first plate was placed in front of the Owls.
“Sushi,” announced Sarah.
“I thought you’d have known all about sushi, Nish,” said Jenny.
“What is it?” snarled Nish. “It looks alive!”
“It’s raw,” said Sarah. “Raw fish.”
“Whatdya mean? They cook it at our table, like that steak they do in restaurants?”
“You eat it raw,” said Jenny.
“I’m not eating anything that hasn’t been cooked!”
Travis looked at the plates as they landed in front of him. The sushi looked more like artwork than food. It was beautiful, each piece perfectly laid out on a little roll of rice with small, green sprigs of vegetable around it. On each roll of rice there was a slice of fish, some very pale, some very red, and some, it seemed, with tentacles.
“Is that what I think it is?” Travis asked Sarah.
Sarah followed his finger.
“It’s octopus,” she said. “Raw octopus.”
Jenny, who seemed to know a great deal about sushi, took over. Like a patient teacher, she pointed to each piece of sushi laid out on the plates before them.
“This one is eel.”
“Yuuucckkkk!” said Nish.
“Squid.”
“Yuuucckkkk!”
“Raw eggs.”
“Yuuucckkkk!”
“More octopus tentacle…”
But Nish was already up and scrambling. He had his Paul Kariya cap over his face and was bolting for the far exit as fast as he could move. Travis noticed that Data had pulled up near the table in his wheelchair and had recorded the entire scene. Good old Data–they’d want to show that one day!
Travis couldn’t help laughing. He had seen Nish act like this once before, when the team was visiting the Cree village of Waskaganish and Nish had eaten, without realizing it, some fried “moose nostrils.” But Nish had come around eventually, and had eventually eaten, and enjoyed, beaver and goose and even some moose nostril. He would come around here in Japan, too. He had to. He was, after all, Mr. Japan on this trip. And this was Japanese food.
Travis tried the sushi cautiously. Sarah and Jenny and Lars had no concern about it, and ate happily. Travis chose the raw tuna to start–he had tuna sandwiches most days at school–and it wasn’t bad. He tried dipping it in the small bowl of soya sauce and green mustard that Jenny held out to him. It tasted even better. He tried the salmon and it was delicious. He tried the octopus, but it was rubbery and made his skin crawl–particularly when he bit down on one of the tentacles–and he spat the rest of it out into his napkin and stayed away from the octopus from then on.
Toward the end of the meal, Sho stood up and introduced the mayor, who would be making a few welcoming remarks to the teams.
The mayor rose slowly, seeming to bask in the applause from the assembled players.
He was an older man–but even so, Travis thought, he moved slowly.
As he got to his feet, he seemed a bit unsteady.
Concerned, Sho reached for the mayor’s elbow.
Muck leapt to his feet and rushed to help, his chair tipping over and clattering onto the floor.
The mayor reached for his throat, then plunged straight forward, his face twisting horribly as he fell across his plate, the legs of the head table giving way under him and the entire table–trays of sushi, flower arrangements, glasses of water, knives, forks, and chopsticks–crashing down onto the floor with him.
Mr. Dillinger, who knew first aid, pushed his way through and reached the mayor. He turned him flat on his back, yanking his collar loose.
He bent down, his ear to the mayor’s open, twisted mouth.
He looked up, blinking at Muck and Sho Fujiwara.
“He’s dead!”