The Boston Breakout

W
ayne Nishikawa licked the stamp and slapped it on the postcard. He stopped to read it to Travis just seconds before he dropped the card into the U.S. Mail box in the hotel lobby. Travis had no time to prevent it from happening. And he couldn’t reach down into the box and pull the postcard back – that would be mail theft, a major crime in the United States of America. Travis Lindsay, captain of the Screech Owls peewee hockey team from the little Canadian town of Tamarack, was nothing if not honest.

Travis let his sometimes-best-friend-sometimes-worst-enemy have it. “You idiot!” he yelled at Nish. “You’re just going to upset your poor mother. Besides, you can’t quit school just like that!”

“Why not? Ben Franklin did. He didn’t need
school. I don’t need school. Guys like us are too smart for school. School is for dummies.”

“Dummies like me, you mean?”

“You said it, not me.”

There were tournaments where all you could remember was the hockey. And there were tournaments where the hockey took a backseat. This trip to Boston, Travis had decided, would be one where the hockey played a secondary role.

First, it was summertime. The coach of the Screech Owls, Muck Munro, hated summer hockey. He had long forbidden the Owls to play in any of the weekend tournaments held during July and August. Summer, Muck argued, was for building up your passion for hockey, and you did that by doing something else completely. He wanted the Owls to play other games – lacrosse, for example, or baseball – and to do other things, like swim and
camp and take canoe trips. He said this would make them all the more keen for hockey when it started up again in the fall. Travis was pretty sure Muck was right. Besides, Travis loved lacrosse almost as much as hockey and was glad for a summer switch in sports.

So, heading off to a hockey tournament in July was very unusual for the Screech Owls.

Travis knew why they were going. It was because of Muck himself. Not because of Muck’s great love of hockey, but because of his passion for history. The coach was always reading history books on their trips. He talked about history whenever he thought they should know more about a place than just where the dressing rooms were. He’d taken them to the Alamo in Texas, to the field outside Pittsburgh where United Airlines Flight 93 had gone down during the terrorist attacks of 9/11, to the ice surface in Lake Placid where “The Miracle on Ice” had taken place years before any of the Owls had even been born. Muck liked hockey trips to have a point beyond plain hockey.

When the invitation arrived for the Owls to
come to the Paul Revere Peewee Invitational Hockey Tournament, Muck put it to a vote among the Owls’ parents and it was unanimous that the team would go. School might be out, but Muck said they’d treat it like a school field trip as much as a hockey tournament. Boston, after all, was where the American Revolution was launched, where Ben Franklin was born, where Paul Revere set out on his horse to warn his countrymen that “The British are coming! The British are coming!”

And Boston was beautiful, a city of world-famous universities, sculls rowing on the Charles River, the Boston Common park, the world-famous New England Aquarium – not to mention the city where the greatest hockey defenseman in history had played – Bobby Orr: number 4.

“I wear number 44,” Nish told his teammates, “so I must be ten times as good.”

Larry Ulmar, whom everyone called Data, sighed. “That would be
eleven
times as good, Einstein.”

Nish snapped back, “Ten, eleven – what’s the difference?”

“The difference,” said Sarah Cuthbertson, the team’s star center, “is that he is Bobby Orr and you are Wayne Nishikawa. That’s roughly the difference between night and day.”

Nish shot Sarah a raspberry – his usual response to being one-upped.

The trip had come together easily. The kids were all off school. Those involved with lacrosse, baseball, football, swimming lessons or camp were all given permission to miss the week. Only a few of the parents would be coming along, but they were traveling on their own. For the Owls themselves, Mr. Dillinger, the team’s beloved manager, had the old team bus – a secondhand school bus – up and running as good as ever.

With Mr. D at the wheel and Muck lost in a huge book about the Boston Tea Party, the Owls had come over the Thousand Islands Bridge near Kingston on a gorgeous bright morning and headed across Upstate New York. They took the ferry across Lake Champlain, Nish screaming all the way that the tiny waves were making him seasick. Over and over, he yelled, “
I
’
M GONNA HURL!
”

Across Vermont, down through New Hampshire, and on into Massachusetts the old bus rumbled. They stopped for pee breaks and for one Stupid Stop, which meant Mr. D handed out small American bills to the players, with instructions to “Buy something completely silly and totally useless.” Nish used his money to buy a little plastic disc launcher and spent the rest of the trip annoying everyone on the bus by shooting tiny flying saucers at them while they were sleeping.

They checked into their hotel – the Marriott Long Wharf, right next to the New England Aquarium – and Muck and Mr. D gave them a half hour to “freshen up” before meeting down in the lobby for something “very special.”

Nish’s idea of freshening up differed from that of Travis and their two roommates: Lars Johanssen, the little Swedish-born defenseman, and Wilson Kelly, also a defenseman. Wilson had been born in Regina, Saskatchewan, but maintained he would one day play hockey in the Olympics for Team Jamaica, if Jamaica ever got a hockey team, because both his parents had come from there. Wilson and
Lars carefully emptied out their suitcases, just as Travis had done, and began dividing up the drawers in the dresser so they wouldn’t be getting things like socks and underwear mixed up. They were almost done when Nish walked into the room, zipped open his suitcase, turned it upside down so the contents landed on the floor, then tossed the empty case in a corner. He plopped down on a bed, reached for the remote, and immediately began surfing channels in the hope that Muck and Mr. D hadn’t asked the front desk to block the adult movie channel. Muck and Mr. D had, however; they knew Nish too well.

A half hour later, all the Owls – Travis, Nish, Lars, Wilson, Data, Sarah, Dmitri Yakushev, Samantha Bennett, Simon Milliken, Derek Dillinger, Jeremy Weathers, Jenny Staples, Jesse Highboy, Andy Higgins, Gordie Griffith, and Fahd Noorizadeh – gathered in the lobby of the hotel. Muck and Mr. D were waiting for them with an announcement.

“We’re going to walk the Freedom Trail,” Muck said.

“Can’t we drive it?” Nish whined.

Muck ignored the comment and continued. “You’re going to see where the United States was born. Mr. D here has arranged for a guide, and we’re all going to spend the afternoon seeing some of the most historical sites in Boston. So let’s head out. It’s a long walk on a hot day.”

“Don’t they have a video version?” Nish asked.

Muck said nothing. He didn’t need to. His stare froze Nish on the spot.