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  My highly depressing thoughts were interrupted when I felt my teeth rattle.

  “Hey,” someone shouted. “A flat tire!”

  A roaring flap-flap-flap of rubber against the wheel wells slowed, then stopped as the bus driver pulled over and parked on the shoulder.

  Coach Blair yelled for attention. “Go outside for a break if you want. But stay in the ditch. Anyone goes near the road, I’ll kill him quicker than any passing truck could.”

  For an early March day, it was warm. Most of us decided not to bother with our jackets. Here, a couple of hours south of Red Deer, the Alberta fields held no snow. The breeze moving from those dirt-brown fields carried the smell of spring. It felt good to stretch and pull in lungfuls of fresh air.

  The bus driver already had a back hatch of the bus open, and pieces of a huge tire jack sat on the pavement beside him.

  I wandered over to watch.

  “I can’t believe this,” the bus driver was muttering to Coach Blair.

  Coach Blair shrugged. “That’s why we always leave in plenty of time. In case the bus breaks down.”

  “But these tires are new,” the bus driver said. “This one shouldn’t have shredded.”

  I caught them looking at me, so I hunched my shoulders and turned away. Last thing I wanted was a coach-to-player chat from Coach Blair about how he was sure I would play better tonight. If he started talking to me that way, it would be all I could do not to make excuses and tell him about my skate rivets.

  It took a half hour to change the tire. That, as Coach Blair announced, would still let us arrive forty-five minutes before game time. Except a little farther down the road, the spare tire went too. Did I want to believe both flat tires were accidents?

  Yes.

  Could I? No. Cockroaches in Jason’s equipment. Someone in our home crowd throwing cola on us at the worst moment. My skate rivet removed. Now two tires blown on the same trip. If someone was trying to make sure we didn’t play our best hockey, that someone was doing a good job. Our team made it to the Medicine Hat arena only twenty minutes before the puck would be dropped to start the game.

  chapter seven

  “Move! Move! Move!” Teddy shouted in the dressing room in Medicine Hat. Teddy’s face was red and the little veins on his nose looked like wriggle worms. “Hurry! Hurry! Hurry!”

  Coach Blair moved beside him. “They’re doing the best they can,” he said. “No sense making it worse.”

  Teddy took a breath and calmed himself. “But you said we didn’t want to delay the game. And opening face-off is any minute and—”

  “Teddy, they’re doing their best,” Coach Blair repeated. “These kids are already nervous enough.”

  We were.

  I probably wasn’t supposed to overhear their conversation, but I was sitting on the dressing room bench closest to them. I was already dressed in my hockey gear and only had to tie my skates, giving me time to look around.

  The dressing room was a mess. Some of the guys had been in so much of a hurry that their street clothes were in heaps on the floor. Others were shouting for their sticks. Or tape. Or equipment adjustments.

  Jason Mulridge caught my eye. He winked, as if to say, “What’s the big deal?” Jason, the guy with the face all the girls in high school wanted to smother with kisses, was so cool. The only time I’d seen him rattled was the cockroach incident. Jason, like me, had also dressed quickly enough that he only needed to tie his skates. And, like me, he preferred to keep his skates loose for as long as possible and always undid them between periods. Your feet get plenty of punishment during the game. No sense making it worse by keeping them tight during rests.

  “Three minutes left,” Coach Blair said quietly. “Who won’t make it?”

  Maybe a dozen hands went up.

  “All right,” he said. “We’ll start the game with whoever’s ready. Looks like Mulridge and McElhaney on defense. Hog, Mancini and Shertzer up front. We’ve got another full line to hold the fort till the rest of you make it to the bench. I don’t want to give the Medicine Hat fans more to cheer about by delaying this game.”

  Just before I bent to tie my skates, I saw nods from those who would be starting the game with me. They were ready. I knew we could do it.

  John Mancini was ready—no surprise—to open the game for his shift as centerman. But then, he was always ready for anything. Skinny, quick and short-tempered, he caused more brawls than a ship full of rowdy sailors. The latter characteristic surprised a lot of people, since Mancini had blond hair and the face of an angel.

  Louie Shertzer, our big redheaded right winger, was just the opposite. You’d think someone with a carrottop like his would get mad at anything. Nope. Nothing riled this guy, not even when we called him by his nickname, Sumo, because he was built as wide as a Japanese sumo wrestler.

  Hog Burnell, the left winger, was also just finishing the last knots on his skates. This guy’s upper body was so big that when he didn’t wear shoulder pads under his sweater, you couldn’t tell the difference. And he was tough. I’d seen him take a puck in the face and just grunt, then score a goal and finally go back to the bench for five stitches.

  When our team walked through the tunnel out to ice level, boos and jeers greeted us.

  We skated three times around our half of the rink, fired a half-dozen shots on Robbie Patterson, our goalie, and that was it for warm-ups. I didn’t even have time to build up my usual pre-game nervousness. Usually I skated in my own world and watched the crowd and worried if I was going to make an idiot of myself in front of those thousands of people. This game, the ref dropped the puck at center before I’d even taken a deep breath.

  Mancini fought hard for the puck as the crowd roared. He managed to spin and throw a hip into the opposing center, while at the same time flicking the puck back toward me.

  Their winger rushed in.

  I stickhandled the puck briefly. With no time to warm up, I didn’t have any feel. So instead of trying a fancy move, I did the safe thing. I fired the puck across to Mulridge, who in turn banked it up the boards to Hog on the left wing. Hog caught the puck in his skates without losing a stride, booted it ahead to his stick and ducked around the defenseman, with Shertzer taking out his winger and Mancini busting in hard from the other side. Just like that, our first play of the game was a two-on-one.

  Jason Mulridge and I moved up the ice to follow the play and reached the blue line just as Hog slid the puck across to Mancini. Mancini boomed his slap shot, and it hit the post on the outside edge. A ringing of metal sounded clearly above the screams of the fans. Their defenseman picked up the rebound and wisely fired it along the boards, trying to zing it past Jason on the blue line.

  Jason managed to get a tiny piece of his stick on the puck as it skidded past. Not enough to slow it down. Just enough to tick the puck. Otherwise their defenseman would have been called for icing.

  Since the icing call was waved off, Robbie Patterson left our net to skate into the left corner and wait for the puck. Normally, this was a routine play. It gave Robbie the choice of flicking the puck ahead to our forward, or, if one of the Tiger players moved in too fast, of spinning and firing the puck around the boards and behind the net to me.

  Except this time it wasn’t routine. Robbie said later he was still cold, and he didn’t feel quite ready for the game.

  In other words, he wasn’t too sure of himself. Or of his position on the ice.

  When he turned to shoot the puck behind the net, he misjudged his position and missed the angle. He only missed by the length of a hockey stick. But it was enough.

  Instead of firing the puck behind the net, he put it into the left corner of his own open net.

  The crowd roared laughter and cheered and booed all at the same time.

  Less than thirty seconds of playing time had passed, and we were down by a goal to the Tigers, a goal our own goalie had scored against us.

  The rest of the game went downhill from there. We were messed up
from getting to the rink late and even more messed up by that early goal. We were so messed up that in one game we made more mistakes than an average team makes in an entire season.

  The game was not pretty. Nor was the result. Seven to nothing for the Tigers.

  I made sure to avoid the newspaper the next day.

  chapter eight

  We had a two-day break until the Prince Albert Raiders visited us in Red Deer. Unfortunately, it did not mean a two-day break from hockey. Coach Blair worked us hard in practice, so hard that Jason’s legs cramped on him and the trainer had to drag him off the ice.

  At school, Mr. Palmer had a great time in English class, pointing out how embarrassing it is to score on your own net and then to lose by seven goals.

  I had no answer, something else he was delighted to point out. I sat in class and vowed to myself that, no matter what, we were going to beat the Raiders. We needed to. With sixteen games left in the season, we had to win twelve of them to make the playoffs.

  As I drove up to the Centrium arena at four o’clock on game day, I saw Coach Blair and our assistant coach, Thomas Kimball, in the parking lot. They were leaning against Kimball’s truck.

  “Hello, Coach Blair,” I said. “Hello, Mr. Kimball.”

  They both nodded hello.

  “Ready for tonight, Mac?” Mr. Kimball asked. He was a tall, skinny guy, around thirty years old, with a tight crew cut. He ran a construction company, and his pickup truck, like now, was always loaded with lumber and other supplies. Since today was a game day, he was wearing a suit and tie, but he always showed up for practices in work boots, jeans and a T-shirt.

  “More than ready,” I answered.

  “Good.”

  They waved, and I kept walking.

  I would not have given the incident any more thought, except for what happened later that evening during the game against the Raiders. If it hadn’t happened to us, it might have been funny.

  The game started off fine. In fact, it started off great. Early in the first period I had the puck along the boards in our end. The Raiders’ center lined me up to deck me into the boards, but I saw him out of the corner of my eye and managed to stop. He crashed into the boards just in front of me, which brought a big cheer from our hometown crowd. As he staggered to keep his balance, I pushed the puck past him and started to skate around him. He was mad at missing the body check and swung his stick around, clipping me just behind the knee. I fell. The ref called a tripping penalty, and for the next two minutes of the power play we had a one-man advantage.

  Better yet, I managed to score on the power play. Mancini was in deep behind the Raiders’ net. He flipped the puck around the boards, a perfect pass that landed softly on my stick blade. I faked a slap shot, cut in to the center and fired high and hard. The goalie was screened and didn’t know I had scored until the crowd roared.

  It was all we needed to get the crowd into the game. And it makes a difference when the fans are yelling and cheering every time you touch the puck. By the end of the first period we were ahead by two. By the middle of the second period we had increased our lead to four goals. Unfortunately, by the end of the second period, disaster began to slowly wash over us.

  We made a line change for a face-off in the Raiders’ end. I stepped onto the ice along with Jason Mulridge and the first-string forwards, Mancini, Burnell and Shertzer.

  “Oh, man,” Hog Burnell moaned as we skated toward the face-off circle. “I’m going crazy.”

  “What kind of crazy?”

  “Itchy crazy,” he said.

  My first thought was cockroaches. “Can’t be,” I said. “I saw you shaking out your equipment.”

  It was team tradition now. As we pulled each piece of equipment out of our duffel bags, we banged it upside down. We still hadn’t figured out how cockroaches got into Jason’s equipment, let alone remained hidden and unmoving until just before the ref dropped the puck. As a result, we were more than nervous about it happening again.

  “Not cockroaches,” Burnell said. “More like a rash.”

  “Rash?”

  We were skating slowly, and he looked from side to side to make sure no one could hear him. “Like a diaper rash,” he whispered. “It’s killing me.”

  He played the next shift like it actually was killing him. We didn’t score or get scored on, but it was not a great shift for any of us. I noticed Mancini squirming as he skated off the ice into the players’ box. And I noticed a couple of the other guys grabbing their hockey pants and tugging them from side to side as they skated onto the ice.

  By the end of the second period, nearly everyone was groaning. Including me.

  I had an itch on the inside of my thighs that felt like ants were trying to chew through my skin. The itch began to spread, going up my stomach and toward my chest.

  The Raiders scored three goals on us in the last five minutes of the second period, and none of us cared. All we wanted to do was get to the dressing room and find out what was causing the horrible itching.

  “Guys!” Coach Blair yelled as we marched into the dressing room at the end of the second period. “What is going on out there?! Three goals! You had them dead and let them off the hook!”

  No one answered. We were all frantically undoing our skates.

  “Guys!” Coach Blair shouted.

  Skates off, then hockey pants. I rolled down my long johns and looked at the skin on my legs. Then I lifted my T-shirt. No ants. That was the good news. The bad news was that my skin was red and blotchy. And so itchy I wanted a chain saw to cut my legs off and sandpaper to get rid of the skin on my stomach.

  Other guys were moaning and pointing at the same thing on their legs.

  “Guys!” Coach Blair shouted again. “What is this?”

  Players all started complaining at once about an itchy, burning feeling, like a diaper rash.

  Coach Blair buried his face in his hands. He stayed that way for a minute. Then he lifted his head. “Teddy,” he barked, “it’s got to be the laundry. Did you wash everything since practice?”

  “Sure did, Coach.”

  Assistant Coach Kimball looked over at Mancini, who had his T-shirt off. Kimball shook his head in disgust. “I haven’t seen a rash like that since I left a sample of fiberglass insulation in my pants pocket—”

  Kimball snapped his fingers at a sudden realization. “My wife washed my pants, and the fiberglass mixed right into my jeans. I wore them the next day and got the worst rash I’d ever had.”

  “Teddy,” Coach Blair snapped, “check the washing machine and the filter on the dryer.”

  Teddy had his own room just down the hall where he did all the laundry and repaired rips in socks and sweaters. Without a word, he jogged out of the dressing room.

  Minutes later he returned, holding a soggy lump of pink goo.

  “Fiberglass,” he said. “Someone played a nasty trick, all right. They must have thrown this in while the washing machine was going.”

  We scrambled to get out of our gear. Most of us wore long johns beneath our equipment to absorb the sweat. We replaced what we could with the clothing we had worn to the game. It helped, but only a little.

  We played like a crippled team in the third period. With one minute left in the game, the Raiders scored to tie.

  I remembered how mad I had been in English class when Mr. Palmer taunted me about the team’s losing streak. No one would understand why we gave up this four-goal lead, because itchy long johns was probably an excuse we would keep to ourselves.

  “Jason,” I said as we skated onto the ice for the last shift of the game, “I don’t care what it takes. Get me the puck.”

  He grinned. “It’s yours, pal.”

  He kept his promise.

  Mancini lost the face-off, and the puck squirted ahead to the Raiders’ winger. The winger moved toward Jason, and Jason bumped him into the boards, found the puck and fired it across the ice to me.

  I only had eyes for the Raiders’ net. I broke
past their other winger and had full speed as I reached the Raiders’ blue line. Mancini and Shertzer broke wide as we crossed into their end. One of their defensemen drifted over to cover them. It left me alone with only one guy to beat. I ducked my head like I was going to cut inside, pushed one step outside, then moved back in toward the center.

  The double fake worked. It gave me a split-second opening, and I took advantage of it by pounding a slap shot. It dinged the post and kicked straight out toward Shertzer. The goalie tried to spin himself in Shertzer’s direction but didn’t have time. Shertzer banged the puck into the wide-open side of the net.

  Bingo!

  The crowd erupted like a volcano, and we skated off the ice with a victory. The way we danced around and celebrated in the dressing room made it look like we’d won the Stanley Cup, not just broken a losing streak.

  My joy didn’t last long though. When I walked out to the parking lot, I passed Assistant Coach Kimball’s construction company truck. It was loaded with lumber. And with rolls of mesh wire. And with one other thing I hadn’t noticed earlier.

  Fiberglass insulation.

  chapter nine

  Very few of the players on the Red Deer Rebels actually came from Red Deer. Our hometowns were other places, mainly across the western Canadian provinces. During the season we stayed with Red Deer families who took us in.

  These families were called billets. The Rebels paid them for our rent and groceries, but billets didn’t expect to make money off us. As hockey players, we ate a lot.

  Instead, billet families usually loved hockey and wanted to help out. They did their best to make us feel at home. My own billets, the Henrys, were no different.

  That’s why I was surprised when lunch was quiet the day after we beat the Prince Albert Raiders.

  There were just the three of us sitting in the sunlight of their dining room: me, Mr. Henry and his wife.

  The dining room was my favorite room in the house. The Henrys lived in the part of Red Deer known as Sunnybrook, and their house was on the edge of a park. The dining room had large glass patio doors, and it overlooked trees on a steep hill that led down to a small creek. Some mornings, when I got up early and sat there in the quiet, I would see deer wander up to the fence of the backyard.