The Last of the Lumbermen by Brian Fawcett

into the piss-tank since he was fifteen. That’s har dly unique around here.
    I don’t get people like Alpo, to tell the truth. Life kicks every- one, but that’s no excuse to whine about it all day and all night. Alpo’s job is really a pretty decent one. A City maintenance super- visor’s wages get him a new pickup every two or three years, and he really doesn’t need to take all the crap he gets. Fact is, he chooses to run the Zamboni at all the big events because it gives him something to bitch about. If I had his job, I’d use the facilities every chance I got. Alpo? He hasn’t been on skates for years, just out of sheer perversity.
    Look at it this way: life is reasonably sweet provided you don’t stick the air pump into your miseries, which everyone has. So we don’t live in Los Angeles, and we’re not all rich movie producers. We’re not exactly in Mogadishu shaking empty milk jugs at the United Nations, either. If you live in Los Angeles, you make money, go to film premieres, and keep a loaded gun under your pillow. Fine with me. Even in Mogadishu the re’s the beach. And if you find yourself driving a Zamboni at the Mantua Memorial Coliseum, for crying out loud, go skating once in a while.
    THE GATES AT THE Coliseum’s far end swing open, and I hear Alpo shouting at us.
    â€œAlright, you jerk-offs, get off my ice before I come and run you down.”
    I look at my watch. It’s past seven-thirty, and Gord and I have been skating, side by side, for almost ten minutes without a word exchanged.

TEN
    I ’M NOT A TOTAL ditz. As soon as I have my skates off, I call the Lotus Inn from the phone in Jack’s office. I have a standard order for them: mu shu pork, beef with black bean and garlic sauce, and their special chow mein with shredded duck. Neither Esther nor I are what you’d call hearty eaters, but Bozo makes up for us. If she had her way , she’d go off dog food permanently and live on chow mein. So we usually order more food than we’ll need, eat what we like, and let her have the rest. Most of the time, that means she gets nearly all the chow mein.
    The girl on the phone recognizes my voice — or maybe it’s just the beginning of the order.
    â€œThis M r. Weaver, right?” she says, and reels off the rest of it.
    I admit that she’s got me, and she says, “You come in fifteen minutes. We very busy tonight, but you are special.”
    I thank her without feeling special. The chef at the Lotus knows what he’s doing, and that makes him a civic asset. My kind, anyway. Towns like Mantua are generally a hell of a lot less notable for the quality of their Chinese restaurants than for the number of drunken after-hours diners who barf up their dinners in the restaurant parking lots on their way to their pickups. At the other Chinese food restaurants in Mantua, parking lot puke can get a foot thick by this time of winter. The parking lot outside the Lotus stays pretty clean — maybe because it’s the only Chinese restaurant in Mantua whose chef knows what black bean sauce is and cooks dishes like mu shu pork.
    Gord and I change in silence, another habit we’ve gotten into. If there’s nothing to say Gord doesn’t talk, and I’ve learned to respect that.
    Tonight, neither of us bothers to shower — the leisurely skate cooled us down to no-stink temperatures. I park my gear in my locker, flip the padlock shut, and twirl the dial.
    Gord is standing at the door waiting. “I’ll walk out with you,” he says.
    I nod without saying anything, and we walk to the front doors and look out. It’s snowing again, the relentlessly calm kind of snowfall I’ve never quite seen anywhere else but Mantua. It might add another twenty centimetres to the snowpack before morning but not a single flake of it will drift. You move through this kind of snowfall or you move it out of your way, but it