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December 3, 2003

Culture

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Poetry/Fiction/Essays/etc.

Black-Ice Hockey by Amanda Aikman

It is 6am and we are on our way to watch my brother Ira play hockey in some tiny Saskatchewan farm town. Hague, I think; it seems that we go to a different town every week, and yet they are all the same. There is a school, a church, a gas station, and of course—a hockey rink. My older sister never comes with us; in fact she is usually still sleeping when we get back. Not me though, while all the other eleven-year-old girls are still in bed waiting for the “Smurfs” to come on TV and ogling the Duran Duran posters on the walls of their unkempt bed- rooms, I am braving the freezing winter temperatures and trekking out to these Saturday morning hockey games.

I enjoy watching my brother fly down the ice of the small-town rinks; his jersey tucked in on one side in homage to his hero Wayne Gretzky. But the real reason I go is for my dad. I don’t talk to my dad much. All I really know about him is that he works in an office, he likes the Beatles, he makes good pancakes, he doesn’t like my mother’s family, and he “loves” hockey. One time I overheard him say to my mother that Brodie, my other brother, only came to Ira’s games so he could blow his allowance at the concession stand. “Not like Amanda,” he had said proudly, “She really enjoys the games.” After that I never bought anything from the concession again, not even when my father offered to buy me the coveted Wacky Packages that were all the rage at school.

Our station wagon crawls over the compacted snow with a crunch as we make our way off the highway and onto a gravel road. At least I assume it is gravel, as it is con- cealed beneath the many frozen layers of prairie winter.

“You hear this song kids?” my father asks, gesturing toward the radio, “Paul wrote this for John’s son Julian.” He reaches over to increase the volume so McCartney's singing doesn’t have to compete with his own.

“Honestly Bill, I’m trying to sleep, do you have to keep turning that thing up every five minutes?” my mother asks as she repositions her pillow against the frosty passenger-side window. My mother is not a Beatles fan. In fact my mother is not a music fan. | remember the last time my father had come home excit- edly displaying a shopping bag filled with new albums, my mother’s response was “Oh that’s nice dear. No, I don’t want to listen to them. You know, we have to pay for the kids’ swimming lessons tomorrow, how much “were” those things anyway?” Later that same evening as I listened to the new records with my father, he told me how John Lennon had been killed by Mark David Chapman. My mother’s maiden name is Chapman, and this seemed fitting to me. One Chapman had taken Lennon from the Beatles and another wanted to take the Beatles from my father.

The road is very icy, and my mother has opted not to sleep after all. Instead she is peering intently out the windshield and beginning to recite the latest statistics on “plack-ice” related deaths. Black ice—that slippery killer that apparently just lies in wait to take out unsuspecting motorists like my father—is one of my mother’s favourite subjects and a long-time bone of contention between my parents. The more grim statistics she rattles off, the faster he drives, and the faster he drives the more embellished her statistics become. If you believed my mother, at least 68% of all deaths in Saskatchewan could be directly attributed to the sinister icy culprit.

To avoid hearing the morbid details of the latest fatal- ity, Ira undoes his seatbelt— leaning past me to perch his chin on the right side of my father’s headrest—and asks, “Dad, how many more points do I need to beat Kissel?”

My father, who has been belting out the last verse of

“Hey Jude” in his own attempt to drown out my moth- er, pauses to ponder Ira’s question. Tim Kissel was neck- and-neck with my brother in the race for top scorer, but had recently pulled ahead after Ira had spent most of the last two games in the penalty box. “Well,” says my father, “The way I see it you only need...

“Jesus!” my mother interjects. Not a religious family by any stretch of the imagination, we all know she isn’t finishing my father’s sentence. As we simultaneously redirect our gazes to where she is looking, we see the large pick-up truck that is positioned sideways in the road ahead.

My brother Brodie, who has been sleeping to the right of me, awakens suddenly—whether because of the vol- ume of my mother’s “Jesus!” or the absolute silence that followed it, I’m not sure. Ira sinks back into his spot, seatbelt still unfastened and dangling over the edge of the car’s faded burgundy upholstery. My mother is grip- ping the door handle and muttering something I can’t make out; I imagine she is rummaging through the rem- nants of her Catholic upbringing for a prayer to combat the black ice that has finally come to claim her.

What is happening? This doesn’t make any sense. We're just going to a hockey game; we do this all the time. My mother’s doctored statistics begin flooding back to me: “Four teenagers killed outside of Swiftcurrent—black ice to blame,” “Couple killed in head-on collision returning from Blackstrap, authorities claim black ice a factor.” I add a new one to the list: “Five family members killed early Saturday morning en route to a hockey tournament in Hague. Eldest daugh- ter orphaned and sent to live with relatives in Winnipeg.”

Where is that sound coming from? A low moaning is filling the car and I look from one brother to the other, but their mouths are frozen shut. The sound is coming from my father. He has begun to twist the wheel, his hands pulling it towards him repeatedly as the car begins to spin on the ice. More so than the pick-up truck or my mother’s stories, it is this sound that really frightens me. My father is scared. My father wouldn't be scared unless there was a reason to be.

Ira’s seatbelt. The sound of my father’s moaning and the image of Ira’s dangling seatbelt are the only things that exist right now. There’s no time to fasten it, so I reach over and put my arms in front of him, convinced that my eleven-year-old arms will withstand the force of any impact. They have to—he is my little brother.

We are still spinning and nobody is talking; the only sound is the horrible moaning coming from my father. I think of my sister and wonder if she will cry when she finds out that I am dead. I know she will cry for every- one, but I want her to cry especially for me. I look past Brodie, and see the truck outside of his window; I feel bad for worrying so much about Ira, why had I never made an effort to get along better with Brodie?

Miraculously the spinning stops—the back of our car coming to rest only inches away from the front of the truck. For a moment we are silent, then my mother starts crying and my brothers begin nervously reenacting the close call. My father removes his seatbelt and gets out of the car. I assume he is either inspecting our vehicle or investigating the seemingly abandoned truck. I am wrong. I hear the trunk open and close, and then the sound of my father’s large boots flattening snow as he walks back around the car. He opens Ira’s door and hands him his hockey bag, “Here,” he says, “You'd bet- ter start suiting up in the car, looks like we're going to be late.”

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