The World Cup

     The LaForce brothers hired me out of a saloon in Slave Lake. They were cutting pulpwood in a swamp alongside the Athabasca River and looking for help. Five bucks an hour, under the table, screw the work visa, if I could run a chainsaw and pile slash.

     The pulp trees were an endless thicket of peckerpoles growing in a mosquito hatchery and the LaForce boys were pulpwood professionals. They had worked together so long that they pissed in unison before walking onto the logging unit. They were hunched men, top-heavy from working with their arms and shoulders, simple and honest and friendly, except for Louis, the eldest, who didn't like Americans of any shape. 

    In the camp at night, they played rummy and talked in French of the politics of Quebec while I lounged in my camper shell, listening to a shortwave radio and applying Calamine lotion.

     On the first Saturday night of my employ, I drew three hundred and fifteen dollars Canadian for sixty-three hours of work. In the Slave Lake Saloon, with a dozen Molsen's in him, Jerry LaForce confessed to me that he and his brothers were paid a penny a square foot for knocking down the pulpwood. We were averaging five acres a day. Forty-some thousand square feet to the acre. This penciled out to six hundred dollars per brother, per day.

     The LaForce Boys were Catholics. St. Christopher stood among the chainsaw parts on their dashboards. Jean had the bleeding heart of Jesus tattooed on his left forearm. We did not cut pulpwood on Sunday. That was my assigned morning to cook.

     On my third Saturday night, surly Louis instructed me to have the Sunday breakfast ready by nine o'clock, because the CBC would be broadcasting the final game of the World Cup match at ten and he had once played sandlot soccer in Montreal.

     After pissing into a nettle patch at five on Sunday morning, I crawled back into the camper to take a hit of current events from my radio and discovered that the British Broadcasting Corporation was broadcasting on shortwave the same soccer game their Canadian affiliate was to delay airing until a more civilized North American hour.

     I listened through my old Koss headphones so I wouldn't wake the brothers. It was a juicy game. The score was tied until an Englishman named Geoff Hurst scored two goals in overtime making the final score England 4, Germany 2. I got out of the sack and had the coffee, hog parts, and pancrepes ready by nine.

That gave me a full hour to pimp Louis. I talked soccer like a sucker, like an American, said I figured the game could go either way, but I favored England because I'd been reading in the papers about some guy named Hurst. A French Canadian is going to take the Hessians over the Queen every time. By ten o'clock I had Louis on the hook for five hundred Canadian.

I held my breath at the beginning of the broadcast. The CBC never mentioned the taped delay. Neither did I. I tended the cook fire and watched Louis' face as Hurst became the first  player in a World Cup final to score three goals in one game. I stashed his money in the air cleaner of my truck.

Two months later, when the snow began to fly, the brothers shut down the pulpwood operation. Alaska seemed too far away in the wrong direction. It was time to wander to California. First, I drove to Athabasca, bought Louis a new American chainsaw and a Pakistani soccer ball, and left them on the seat of his truck outside the Slave Lake Saloon.