Читать книгу The Uninvited Guest - John Degen - Страница 12

Only once, in August 1989, had Stan run across a situation with the Cup he felt he couldn’t handle on his own. The championship trophy had been booked for a party by a young left-winger named Dalton Gunn, in his hometown of Eganville, Ontario, a five-hour drive from Toronto. It was a standard weekend job—drive up on the Friday night and figure out the town, shepherd the Cup all the next day when an impromptu tour of the townsfolk would be begged of him, stand watch during the drunken Saturday night festivities trying not to get too in the bag himself, and sneak the trophy back out of town before sunrise and the mischievous hangovers of Sunday. He’d pulled this job countless times in countless small towns within a clear day’s drive of Toronto.

Stan packed the Cup in a League van, and took the northern route. He left Toronto at its top end, on the two-lane Highway 7, avoiding for the most part the bung of weekend cottage traffic that plagued the major highway routes. It was a slow drive all the same and, just before sunset, Stan pulled into a provincial park to eat the sandwiches and cookies he’d packed for himself. He parked the van as close to water as he could get, rolled down all the windows and ate looking out across a short expanse of lake to a massive stone bluff. The park brochure told him the cliff was home to First Nations petroglyphs carved high above the water, but he couldn’t see any such things from his seat. The cliff face caught the last light of day, and Stan sat on after his food, enjoying the reflected heat radiating down on him.

Eganville was two more hours to the north, and Stan kept a careful watch at the road edges for deer. Early evening was a restless time for deer, he knew, and more than once on his many summer drives Stan had been forced from the pavement by a wandering doe. Once, in thick fog, he had just missed a large buck that had lost its footing on the slick pavement and crashed to his haunches trying to escape Stan’s headlights. The desperate animal bucked and twisted in the middle of Stan’s lane and he had to watch carefully while he steered past, to make sure the poor thing didn’t bang a hoof or antler against his fender in terror. For the rest of the fog, Stan slowed the van below sixty kilometres an hour, and honked his horn at regular intervals. If he hit a mature buck at high speed, chances were they’d both be killed by the impact, and then who knows what would happen to the Cup, abandoned in favour of death on a deserted northern roadway.

Stan reached Eganville by ten o’clock, and checked into the hotel on the main street. Above a certain latitude, the Canadian towns Stan visited for his job pretty much followed the same plan. A central main street near either a river, lake or rail line, a compact collection of local businesses and services huddled together in a clump around the central intersection, a small school, usually at least one church (sometimes as many as three even for the smallest populations), a hockey arena, some kind of local diner, a gas station, and a hotel with a tavern on the main floor. Eganville followed the plan.

Stan secured the Cup in his room, tested the door lock several times and descended to the tavern by a creaking back staircase that smelled alarmingly of woodsmoke and grease.

“That better be the kitchen,” he mumbled. “I sure as hell don’t want to be jumping out a window in the middle of the night with that frickin’ Cup on my back.”