Reality Check in Detroit (3 page)

“Well, that’s definitely the kind of reality-
TV
gold Inez is looking for,” laughed Daniel as he swung the microphone back in Nish’s direction – where Nish thought it should have been all along.

Nish put his shades on, lay back on all his stuff like he was lounging poolside, and started purring. “What can I do? A star has got to shine,” he said.

“Get used to all your gear now, because you’ll be using it tomorrow. First call is at 7:00 a.m. sharp,” Inez barked as she poked her head back into the room, her phone still attached to her ear.

All of the Owls nodded, except for Nish, who was now wearing his helmet and was busy trying to slide his jock over his jeans.

“Oh, and be on time, because we have a twelve-hour day ahead of us,” Inez said, tucking the clipboard under her arm. “And you,” she motioned to Nish, “bring the shades.”

Travis wasn’t sure he liked hearing Inez encourage Nish. It was something the Owls had learned the hard way. When Nish started getting crazy, it was best to ignore him. Whatever you did, you never encouraged Nish.

N
ormally, Travis would have been first on the ice at the Joe Louis Arena. He liked nothing better than to step out onto a clean sheet. He loved to roar down the rink alone and take that first corner, digging in hard and flicking his skates at the end of each stride so that his blades sizzled and, with a bit of luck, tossed up a spray of ice or sometimes even water that had yet to freeze if the Zamboni had just finished.

He wouldn’t be first today, though: his roommate had spent too much time on his hair and fawning over his new equipment. Nish had even taken the time to draw a crooked star on some hotel stationery, write “44” in the middle of it, and stick it on the bathroom door, claiming the room as his own. He had made them late for the short walk along the waterfront to the players’ entrance at the back of the arena. When they arrived with Mr. D and two other stragglers, Gordie Griffith and Lars Johanssen, Muck and the others were already there.

They had given their names to the security guard and then walked along the corridor to where Muck and the other Owls were gathered. All the Owls had their new tracksuits and jackets on and were carrying their bags of new equipment and their sticks. Muck stood out like a sore thumb: same old hockey windbreaker, same baggy pants. He had, however, put on a clean shirt.

Mr. D had a fancy new jacket that had “
MR
.
D
” and “
MGR
” on the sleeve. Travis knew that somewhere there would be a large, brand-new hockey jacket with “
MUCK
” and “
COACH
” on the arm. Likely hanging in Muck’s closet back at the hotel. Maybe stuffed in a corner, out of sight. Travis wasn’t surprised: the one thing the Owls could absolutely depend on was that Muck would never change.

“I want you to follow me,” Muck was telling the Owls, “and use your eyes, not your mouths.”

He stared hard, once, in Nish’s direction and led the Owls down the twisting corridor until they came to a brightly lit area entirely painted in red and white, the colors of the Detroit Red Wings. He stopped in front of a wall with “
HOCKEYTOW
N
” written on it in large red letters. “
HOME OF THE
1997, 1998, 2002 & 2008
STANLEY CUP CHAMPIONS
.”

“Wow!” exclaimed Fahd. “Four Stanley Cups.”

“Eleven,” Muck corrected him. “The Joe replaced the Olympia, the old rink where Gordie Howe and Ted Lindsay won cups. The Red Wings have won eleven times.”

“Wow again!” said Fahd.

Travis said nothing. But inside he was glowing. Muck had just mentioned Terrible Ted Lindsay, Travis’s distant relative. Gordie Howe’s line mate. Stanley Cup champion. There were even statues of both Gordie Howe and Ted Lindsay in the Joe.

“Read the names,” Muck told them, pointing to the list of players that had been on each of the Cups. “The only way I know for a hockey player to live forever is to have your name on this Cup.”

Nish walked up so close to one of the lists that his nose was almost touching it. He seemed to be squinting, reading furiously.

“You won’t find ‘Nishikawa’ there!” Sam laughed.

“It’ll be there one day,” Nish snapped back.

“Only if you change your name to Stanley,” Sarah giggled.

Nish gave both girls the full raspberry.

“Let’s get ready,” Muck told them. “We’re on the ice in fifteen.”

“Hollywood has … arrived!”

Nish slammed open the door of the Screech Owls’ dressing room and stepped out onto the rubber carpeting of the Joe, preening as though he were stepping onto the red carpet at the Oscars. The only thing missing was the wild clicking and whirring of the paparazzi’s cameras as they shot photographs of the twelve-year-old celebrity’s arrival, and a beautiful blonde in an evening gown gushing all over him as she interviewed him.

Nish ambled along the corridor and down the chute toward the ice surface, mindful to stick to the rubber mat for fear of wrecking Mr. D’s careful skate sharpening on the concrete. He held his new black Bauer helmet out like a trophy with one hand and ran his other hand along the side of his head, smoothing out his Elvis-style pompadour.

Nish was dressed for superstardom.

The Screech Owls had played the Motors once before in a tournament. The Motors had been quick and well coached and a good test for the Owls, but that tournament had been the previous season, and teams could sometimes change considerably in a year. The Owls had no idea what to expect this time

“What are you going to do with your bow tie while you play?” asked Travis, stepping out of the chute with Nish and approaching the gate. “Wear it on your butt like a lucky rabbit tail?”

“Ha-ha,” Nish responded with a gentle elbow to Travis’s gut. He lifted his throat protector to reveal that he was still wearing the bow tie around his neck. And when he pushed a button on the side of the sparkly black tie, it lit up like a winning slot machine.

“This superstition stuff is serious,” Nish said to Travis as they prepared to step out onto the shiny ice of the Joe. “I even flushed the blade of my stick – my
new
stick – for a little extra luck.”

The flashing lights on his bow tie stopped and he tucked it back under his throat protector.

“I’m going to nail my spin-o-rama during this skills comp,” he said. “I have to. The television audience will love it!”

Travis was sick of hearing about Nish’s spin-o-rama move. Ever since the Owls had seen some
NHL
er use it during a shootout on
TV
, he’d been trying it in practice, sometimes falling flat on his butt, sometimes losing the puck as he suddenly reversed direction and tried to loop the puck around on his backhand. Once, he’d completed it perfectly but was in so tight to the net that Jenny Staples had just stood there giggling as Nish realized he had no place to shoot. Jenny simply fell to her knees, her big goal pads smothering the puck.

Still, Nish was determined to master it.

Travis shook his head as he did a little skip out onto the ice, turning quickly and skating backward away from Nish and his starry-eyed schemes.

“Don’t keep them waiting, Hollywood!”

S
till skating backward so he could see how Nish tackled his awkward combination of sunglasses and helmet, Travis listened for the delicious sound of pucks slapping on fresh ice. He knew without even turning that Mr. D would be tossing pucks over the boards for the warm-up. Travis turned fast and hard and skated to the growing bunch of pucks, kicked one up onto his stick blade, swooped in, and rang a wrist shot off the crossbar.

First shot and he heard a
clang
of the metal – it was going to be a good day for Travis Lindsay. He felt great. He loved his new equipment. His new skates were so light it felt like they weren’t even there – almost as if a steel blade had grown from the bottom of his bare foot. Nish had told Travis his new skates were so comfortable he wasn’t even wearing socks, something he claimed the legendary Bobby Orr had done when he played a million years ago.

Nish finally abandoned his sunglasses on the Owls’ bench in favor of his shiny Bauer helmet. He seemed to be loving his new equipment, too. With an Elvis-style wiggle of his hips – to the cameras, of course – he scooped up one of Mr. D’s pucks and took several hard strides before trying his beloved spin-o-rama move. First try, he lost the puck. Second try, he lost his footing and fell flat on his face.

With Jeremy Weathers and Jenny taking shots from the other Owls, Nish moved his spin-o-rama practice to center ice, where he fell again and committed one of hockey’s greatest sins: he slid across the center line into the Detroit Motors’ warm-up territory, where an assistant coach was setting up pylons for a stickhandling drill.

Nish took out several of the pylons.

“Hey, Clumsy – get your big butt outta here!” the young coach shouted.

Nish got up sheepishly and skated back to his own side of center. “Agh! Don’t worry about me…,” the coach shouted. “I’ll just set it all up
again
.”

Travis noticed that the Detroit player who came over to help gather the scattered pylons was even taller than the coach. The kid must have been nearly six feet tall. Travis took note of the name and number on the somewhat worn-looking Motors jersey:
NO
. 22,
KELLY
.

Usually, when Travis looked across the ice at another peewee team, he’d see a bunch of kids roughly the same size as the Owls. Maybe one or two would be taller, maybe a couple smaller than the rest. Nish, of course, was wider than any of the other Owls. But the Motors had four
giants
in their lineup. Really big players who towered over the others.

On top of that, number 22 seemed to be extremely talented: once the pylons were in place again, the tall player crisscrossed his way down the pylon line with a speed and fluidity Travis had never before witnessed. This guy skated like an artist. Sarah and Sam watched with their mouths wide open, and even Nish took a moment to marvel at the player’s skill.

Then, at the final pylon, number 22 did something Travis had always dreamed of doing – something he’d never even seen another hockey player do. He turned his feet out so his left skate faced directly left and his right skate faced directly right, and he curled around the pylon like a sharp knife peeling an apple.

“
Whoa
!” shouted Sam, and she and Sarah hammered their sticks on the ice in appreciation. Number 22 looked over and saluted with a big smile and a raised stick.

Nish, of course, couldn’t stand it when people paid attention to someone else. Having recovered from his wipeout, he picked up the puck again, raced back close to center ice, launched his spin-o-rama move, and, very slowly … pulled it off! He’d spun in a complete circle and still had the puck on his stick. He hadn’t scored, but he hadn’t fallen. He skated over to the boards, banging his stick on the ice in admiration of his own move.

“Nish is very religious, you know,” Sarah said to Sam and Travis.

“I don’t think so,” Travis said, not following.

“Well, he obviously worships himself.”

“A church with a congregation of one,” Sam added with a giggle.

Travis giggled, too, but he was watching the other team rather than Nish’s desperate bid for attention. The more he thought about it, the more he realized that number 22’s height and skill level weren’t all that seemed odd. The Motors, unlike the Owls, didn’t have brand-spanking-new Bauer equipment. Some of them even wore socks that didn’t match: one girl had on blue Maple Leafs socks; a couple were in red Detroit Red Wings socks; and one player was in the red, white, and blue of the Montreal Canadiens.

If this had been a real game, Travis would have wondered what was going on. All the teams the Owls played had matching colors.

“There’s kind of a funny vibe here, don’t you think?” Sarah whispered to Travis once number 22 had moved on to stickhandling, at which he wasn’t at all impressive, losing the puck almost constantly as he tried to work it back and forth. Travis was leaning against the boards, stretching his hamstrings now that his muscles were a little warm. “There’s something weird about the way the Detroit Motors are moving around the ice. I can’t figure it out.”

Travis shrugged and tried to look casual, not like they were gossiping about the other team.

“And what’s with their equipment? I mean, why isn’t it new, like ours?” asked Sarah, quietly trying to maintain his attention.

Travis gave Sarah a look. She had noticed it, too. “Muck said that Detroit is poor,” he said. “That the whole city’s suffering and that we should count ourselves lucky.”

“Yeah, but why are we luckier than they are?” Sarah said, tugging at her new jersey, the
NHL
-quality Bauer jersey in the Screech Owls’ red and black colors, the crest on it thick and solid. The jersey even had the loose ties at the neck, just like the
NHL
ers had. “This swag just came with the show – didn’t they get any?”

Again, Travis shrugged.

Another one of the big Detroit Motors’ players took a shot. It pinged so loudly off the crossbar it made Fahd jump. Travis was impressed. He could never fire a puck like that. The player – number 98, Smith – started doing tricks from center ice. He got down on his knees and began lobbing pucks so high that, after numerous attempts, one landed, and stuck, on the top of the net. Travis had heard that a Russian player, Alexei Kovalev, who had once played for Ottawa, could do that regularly, but he’d never seen anything like it in a peewee practice.

Compared to the Detroit Motors, the Owls’ warm-up was barely a spark. Muck had put a stick across two pylons, and the players skated up, hopped over it while the puck slid underneath, and then they had to keep it going. He had them practice skating in patterns around the circles, the drill that always made Travis think of a formation of swallows in flight. And they practiced their passes. But none of that was as fancy as what the other players were doing.