Race With A Dinosaur (eBook)

Hockey Fever!

CHAPTER TWO

Hey! Welcome back! Anybody like hockey? Well, I sure do! I personally think one of the best things life has to offer is a really good game of hockey right in front of your own house! It’s the only sport you can play three full seasons thanks to skates with blades and skates with wheels! It didn’t bother Ricky and me that our pads and stuff were all used and needed to be repaired all the time. It was the game of hockey that we loved.

Two people I especially liked having on my team were my best friends, Justin and Ani. Justin or Dusty as everyone called him, lived one street over from mine, and was always at my house or I was at his. He was like the, “third son my mom and dad never had,” as they would say. He had two brothers, Mike and Matt, and a big dog named Conrad, who liked to hang around us more than we would have preferred, especially when we wanted to play hockey.

If they didn’t bring Conrad to our games he’d bark non-stop till they went and got him. It didn’t help that his bark was loud enough to make all the other dogs in town join in. But it never failed, every time they brought Conrad he’d get all excited and manage to wriggle out of his leash and steal the tennis ball we used for a puck. We’d yell at him and chase him all the way up and down Carlton Street. I think he thought this was how you actually played hockey. Every time we had him cornered, Conrad would deek around us, and we fly off in various directions, trying to catch him. Ani would shake her head and roll her eyes way back as she watched pretty much the same scene, every Saturday morning. One weekend we finally had enough and everyone chipped in for a whole new can of tennis balls. Conrad was awarded the old one as his very own. He seemed pretty happy with this arrangement and was content to sit and chew on it like a favourite old shoe.

Ani, short for Anistasia, was my other best friend. She lived on my street and seemed like the only official girl for miles around. In my family she was like the, “daughter mom and dad never had.”. She took ballet lessons and played the piano but was also pretty tough and one heck of a hockey player in her own right. I think her being a dancer gave her some kind of an edge to the sport. As we all stumbled over our ever-changing feet sizes, there was Ani, gracefully gliding around us, making her way down to the other end. She easily made double the amount of shots on goal as the rest of us. Too bad she had trouble finding the net most of the time, but hey, she was on our team and extremely loyal. That’s what really mattered.

I think Ani liked hanging out with us but I know she secretly wished there was at least one other girl in the area she could be best friends with. She brought several much-needed elements to our games – good sportsmanship and plenty of cold pop to drink. Her dad worked at the bottling plant so their family always had a good supply of any flavour we wanted. Ani also had a great sense of humour. She had to have one, in order to put up with a bunch of competitive boys all wanting to become the next Wayne Gretzky.

We didn’t have any official hockey teams like the NHL. Instead we had a sort of a league of our own with our team being the unofficial “North American All-stars.” The other team we always played against was the unofficial “Team Russia” headed up by a classmate by the name of Dirk Peters.

Dirk Peters… Man… He was probably the oldest grade sixer in the history of Golden Prairie Elementary. Rumour had it he was no less than thirteen and possibly the poorest loser any of us had ever played hockey with. Every Saturday morning, like the rising of the sun, Dirk would show up with his cousins Bart and Fred and his younger brothers Seth, Dobber, and Manny. Emotions were always high and on any particular Saturday. Dirk and his team played for one reason and one reason only – to win! This meant that injuries were very much part of the game and the sad part was that nearly all of them happened to our team. But in the end we accepted this as good training for our future careers in the NHL.

In school Dirk showed every bit as much class as he did at playing hockey. From grade four on, we all studied French together and even after two full years of the language, no matter what question the teacher asked him, Dirk always gave the same response, “Uhhh… Oui!…..?” Then if the teacher frowned at him he quickly responded with, “Oh, non!” Naturally we all laughed, because that was what Dirk wanted from us. If you didn’t you could be the recipient of a punch-buggy in the arm or worse yet a purple-nurple when the teacher had to leave the class for some reason.

Speaking of class… and yeah, I know it’s not polite to talk about this kind of thing. But when something happens in life that is truly amazing you have to talk about it even if it’s something everyone tries not to talk about. Dirk Peters was probably the proudest person I have ever met when it came to the wonders of passing gas! Like the internal combustion engine in a car, the body is an amazing thing. I don’t know what his parents fed that boy. I don’t even know why he’d been gifted in such an expressive way but he definitely had the corner on this obnoxious body function. I got absolutely grossed out with him one day. I decided that just as I my father spent his life classifying and naming fossils, I decided I would spend this time classifying and naming the more modern fossil fuels that came from Dirk. I secretly began documenting each and every different type of sound he could produce.

There were the standard cherries, the warblers, and the poof-balls – common for most human beings. There were Dirk’s trademarks – one called a Houston boom-ball lift-off and one called the Leaning Tower Boo-Wang. Then there were the Quakers – you know … the kind that can set off a school fire alarm or totally disrupt the seriousness of a math test. There were the repeaters – kinda like a machine gun. Dirk’s all time record was thirty-two shots before having to re-load – impressive, even for something this disgusting.

Then there were the two and three toners – you know? The kind that belong on Jeopardy because they’re squeezed out in the form of a question? There was some that made these sickening splatter sounds that I was convinced left their mark - if you know what I mean. I called them Spiteenies and Spitooys. Thankfully they were rare… And there were various long tailed ballistic missiles, like the B-52’s, the Stingers, the Tomahawks and of course, the Scuds that always caught you off guard… And finally…Dirk had a biological weapon that never failed to clear a room - the sometimes silent but extremely deadly - Mexican Chilli Bomb! Such power should never be given to a human being no matter what the age…

It was somewhere near the fourth week of school; the teacher was out of the room and Dirk began giving us all one of his famous body concerts. Somewhere near about the third movement, for some weird and unexplainable reason Dirk accidentally dropped a live atomic weapon in his underwear! Well, we all ran for our lives like Godzilla had just stepped into the classroom. The expressions on some of the girl’s faces made you believe that they were being boiled alive in hot oil. I remember the caretaker being summoned by something called a code brown. I think it should have been more like the super-market with a wet clean-up on aisle three!

It’s tough to say which suffered more that day – the pride of Dirk Peters or the rest of the class for the horror of a scene that would forever be etched in our tender young minds… But …you know? Two weeks later, when things blew over - so to speak, Dirk was back at it like the gentleman God had created him to be. And me? Well… I settled for keeping my historic record and running total of each passing.

***

The second the Friday school bell rang it was tradition that we would all gather behind the school to talk hockey strategy for Saturday’s game. This gave us all a chance to confirm who would be in town, who might be bringing someone new, and who could bring snacks for the breaks between periods. Ani always started by volunteering to bring pop and her offer was met with a unanimous nod of approval around the circle of players. The rest of us all promised a supply of whatever the cookie of the week was in each family. Then we began a round robin of brainstorming for new plays we could use against Dirk and the rest of his team.

“Somehow we have to find better ways of passing the ball without getting creamed all the time!” Dusty said as he rubbed his arm from last Saturday. We all nodded in agreement. This was the same problem we’d had since we started playing against Dirk and the boys. “More practice,” was the conclusion we all came to.

It had been around ten minutes since we were let out of school when it dawned on me that someone was missing from our strategy session. I got this strange feeling in my gut… In the entire history of our hockey franchise my little brother Ricky had never missed a Friday meeting after school …

“Anyone seen Ricky?”

“Nope,” everyone echoed.

“Hmm, that doesn’t make sense. He came to school with me this morning.”

“Must’a went home after...