The Last Season (11 page)

But that's not the only thing that separates us. They all have their teeth. All of them, all of their teeth. And that says all anyone ever needs to know about European hockey, as far as this boy's concerned.

Pekka's on the phone. He wants to know what I'm up to with this free weekend, last one till January.

“I was thinking maybe I'd drive over to Turku.”

“
Turku
?” Pekka roars. “Finns go to Turku to die, man.”

I cannot tell him there's an eight-hundred-year-old castle there that the tourist guide says was once ruled by a Polish princess, Katarina Jagelonica. I thought maybe a postcard of that and a few souvenirs and Poppa would lay off about me going to Poland. What am I supposed to do? Race over so I, too, can riot over horse flesh? What does he expect of me? Join Walesa? Does Solidarity even have a team?

“I don't know. Maybe I won't.”

“Pia and I, we are off to Stockholm,” he says in his precise, singing manner, the voice too high, the words always coming out like he is reading, not thinking. The way they all sound, at least the few who speak English. In Finnish they sound like Poppa's diesel-fired washing machine.

“Great.”

“Come with us.”

“Nah, you two go off and enjoy yourselves.”

“There is to be three of us.”

“Who else?”

“Come and see for yourself, man.”

No doubt, they are truly different over here. A blind date for the weekend? I couldn't believe it. But Pekka told me to be at the Siljaline boarding platform on the south harbour at five and to look for the
Newbuildings
— a ship, not a construction project. When I found it they were already there, Pekka in that powder-blue three-piece suit that makes him look more like an insurance salesman than a hockey player, Pia in a thin green coat that with her red hair makes her look like an iris in full bloom, and Kristiina….

… Kristiina …

I see her as I am coming up the gangplank. She stands just to the side of Pekka and Pia, the two of them waving frantically and Kristiina just smiling patiently, perhaps not even smiling at all but braced against the harbour wind. Her hair blows, soft maple-coloured bangs lifting as if they were electrically charged, light blue eyes, high cheekbones, a full mouth. The kind of talent about which Torchy would have said you'd expect to find staple marks in her belly. I race up the rest of the gangplank glad my leather jacket is open, proud of the loud jangle of metal around my neck, pleased that the winter sun is glinting, with luck, on the hair that spills over the highest button in my Lou Myles pink silk shirt. I run and smile like an Old Spice commercial.

“Hey, man,” Pekka shouts. “We thought you were not coming.”

“Traffic,” I explain.

“The weekend,” he explains back.

Pia kisses me on the cheek, filling my nose with that bewitchingly lewd smell she wears as if it's perfectly natural for people to walk around snorting in each other's neck.

“Bats,” Pekka says. “This is Kristiina. Kristiina, I would like for you to meet Felix Batterinski.”

“Hi,” I say.

“Hello.”

I reach for her hand and feel foolish, as if we are business acquaintances or something. She takes it, her hand long and slender and without nailpolish, no jewellery, and when I shake and let go the hand drops back quickly, unsure.

“I'm pleased to meet you,” I say stupidly.

“And I am most pleased to meet you,” she says, smiling as if I am a child she is dealing with. “Much has been said about you.”

I feel the old burn moving toward my ears.

A long time ago I decided that hockey was
the
masculine game. Sports go roughly like this, from masculine to feminine: hockey, football, baseball, soccer, tennis. Hockey requires both strength and thought. Football requires strength, the thought they send in from the sidelines. Baseball would qualify higher if they allowed body contact, but they don't. Soccer requires a weak mind that won't get bored while running up and down a lawn never scoring. And tennis, of course, rewards those with limited skill with the illusion that they are actually playing properly. Only hockey has it all: the basic skill level required, strength, quick thought, imagination, body contact, conquest. Back in the early seventies — I think when I'd just gone to the Flyers — some academic in Montreal published a book claiming hockey was a metaphor for sex (man with big stick fires projectile past goalie's legs into net to score and triumph), and all the hockey writers were doing snide columns on this guy and calling him a goof. Not me. He was onto something, I say.

What I'm coming to is groupies. Doesn't matter what city or what hotel you're in, they find you. They're easy to spot because they have a common-denominator look: skinny in tight pants, larger than average boobs, braless and showing it, heavy eye shadow, and so much orange blush on their cheeks that some look like you have to peel them like a tangerine, nervous hands, giggles, frightened eyes. They ask for nothing and they refuse nothing, which is what delights guys like my buddy Torchy Bender and spooks guys like me, who are always convinced they're either lying about their age, or their health or both. Torchy, though, he never backed away from any of them, which is why part of him has never left Chicago, where he played before we joined forces once again in Philadelphia. He fell in with the Plaster Casters when he played with the Black Hawks; they'd come to the Stadium looking for Joe Cocker and ended up, somehow, with Torchy; and before the night was out there was a full-scale plaster-of-Paris replica of Torchy Bender at his mightiest, the skin down one side included. They had to graft from his shoulder to fix him up, and five years later in Los Angeles he was still dining out on the old joke that ever since he's had bursitis down there and is under doctor's orders never to lift anything heavy. He usually said that to rookies at the urinal. Then he'd add that it's always stiff no matter how much he rubs it.

It would be a lie to say I am myself pure. There are names and faces and rear ends I no longer recall in all twenty-one National Hockey League cities. I have gotten down on my knees (not always willingly) and thanked God for penicillin. And since I got to Helsinki, room 622 has seen Lise, Hilder, another Pia, and, I think, an Annie, all overseas equivalents of the National Hockey League groupie, these discovered eager-eyed and willing at the Viisi Pennia rather than the elevator of the Mariott or the lobby of the Westbury. I offer no excuses. Ten beers into 1:00 a.m. and a hockey player's in love with himself anyway, so letting a mutual admirer come back to the room for the night is simply an act of kindness. But 8:30 a.m. and the sun comes white and cruel across TÖlÖviken pond and I find myself lying there listening to the trams squeak to a stop outside the window and I can't even remember her name.

It never works out for me. Never. I've been close; I've been disappointed; I've been grateful. Poppa always goes on about me being thirty-six years old and never married, the last of the Batterinski line, childless, and I always give him the same bull about never having met the right girl. A convenient stopper, corny, but true.

And now Kristiina.

The
Newbuildings
lowers the vehicle ramp, closes the chute and pulls away from her slip. We stare out silently, all four of us, and I concentrate deliberately on the day, fixing the white sky against the green dome of the cathedral, its gold cross glinting in the pale light. The market is busy, red canopies snapping in the air, gulls thieving, balloons, the crowd shimmering in a rainbow of ski jackets. And I realize I have been unfair. This is not Sudbury with a harbour. This is Helsinki. Kristiina could not have come from Sudbury. Bertha came from Sudbury.

“To the bar, man?” says Pekka, raising himself stiff-armed from the railing as if the harbour is a movie that has bored him.

“Yes,” says Pia.

I look at Kristiina and she shrugs and smiles and I smile back, but it is not a meeting to equals. My smile is forced, I know; it's been that way since I lost my teeth. My upper lip hangs down like it's still afraid a puck's coming. Kristiina's teeth seem anxious to get out and show off. Next time I smile, I will have my moustache go it alone.

We head off to the main lounge but it is full and Pekka leads us up a narrow stairway to a smaller, darker bar on the port side where there is a table near the back under the fish net and traps. There are only two waiters, however, and service is slow. Pia seems determined to sell me to her friend. I am not just Canadian, she tells Kristiina, I am also a Pole.

“I cry every time I think of the Poles,” Kristiina says. “It seems to me so sad and unnecessary, I think.” Her voice is like water rolling over stone. She should be talking about puppies, not Poles. I half expect Pekka's idiotic joke:
What's a Polish Rubik's cube? All one colour.
But he resists.

“How does it affect you, Felix?” Pia asks. She leans forward onto her folded hands, grim. What am I supposed to say — it makes me itch?

I shrug. I wish I had a drink to look down into, a nearly empty glass to pick up and swirl. What do they want me to do? Stand up and sing that idiotic anthem the way Poppa would? (
“Poland is not yet lost as long as we are alive …”
)

“They are saying in the broadcasts that there are fourteen thousand Solidarity members in prison,” Kristiina offers, “Perhaps even more.”

The conversation rolls around me and I shake my head in amazement, nod in agreement. The illusion is that all that goes about the head is also held within. But I know none of this stuff. No meat. No chicken feed, no chicken, no milk, fruit or toilet paper, no heat at home and none at work, line-ups to join line-ups, twelve bucks a month for a six-day-a-week job …

“It breaks your fucking heart,” Pekka says to the table, his awkward use of the dressing-room word nearly making me laugh. “But how could they go on in such a system that requires you to sacrifice everything for your children and then twenty years later you look at those children and they are worse off than you?”

We all nod. I eye the room, hoping to catch the attention of a waiter.

“You are a Pole,” Kristiina says to me. I melt. “What do you think of Lech Walesa?”

How do I answer that?
Walesa?

“Oh,” I say finally. “I think he's great, great.”

“He will win the Nobel prize,” Pekka says, as if it's fixed.

“If he is alive,” Pia says.

Thank God the waiter comes, finally. Pekka orders first, two
koskenkorva
, a schnapps-like drink he and Pia always mix with 7-Up and which I always say tastes like coal oil. I shake my head when the waiter tips his pencil my way and concede to Kristiina.

“
Lakka
,” she says.

“What's that?” I say, grateful to be leaving Poland.

“Try one,” she dares.

“Sure. Why not?”

The drinks come and Pekka orders another round before the first sip is taken. I eye this
lakka
. It seems thick, syrupy, a light orange with a wine smell to it. A girl's drink.

“Lovely,” I lie to her after the first sip. “What is this stuff?”

“Cloudberry,” she says. “It is a liqueur. Very popular in Finland.”

“What's a cloudberry?” I ask.

“It grows up north, man. Wild,” Pekka says with enthusiasm. “In the wet areas — what do you call them?”

“Lakes?”

Pekka snorts. “No. Bad water. Muddy.”

“Swamps.”

“That's it. Swamps.”

I lift the drink and spin it professionally in the light. “We have wild berries where I come from. Blueberries and raspberries. Blueberries grow around swamps. Are they like that?”

“Lakka aren't blue. Red.”

“What is a raspberry?” Pia asks, leaning toward me, curious.

I give her one, loud and spitting, my upper lip burbling over my tongue like an outboard motor. I expect laughter, but the table offers only confused stares. The Finns at the next table are turning as if something is out of order at our table. Something is. Me.

“It's a joke,” I explain badly. “We do this thing in Canada and call it a ‘raspberry,' see. When we hear something we don't like. It's just a joke.” I can feel my ears burning.

“I see,” Pia says and smiles into her drink. When she looks up I can sense that Kristiina is signalling, and the two women stand up together and leave for the washroom.

“She's fantastic!” I whisper to Pekka.

“Yes, my man, she is.”

“Who is she?”

“Pia's friend. She's an architect.”

I swallow. “I don't think I made a very good impression.”

“Not to worry you,” Pekka says, slapping my shoulder and laughing. “Different cultures and all that. We're used to it. It is nothing.”

The waiter and the women return together. I have calmed a little, warmed by the second drink. My leather jacket is off, but I feel steamy inside. I can sense the ship rolling, creaking; it seems to walk up, hang, then dip, quickly, groaning with each drop, then a repeat, rise, run, hang, drop … rise, run, hang, drop … rise, run, hang, drop … rise …

“Felix?”

It is Pekka, concerned. I open my eyes.

“You all right, man?”

I nod. “Maybe I'll just get some air,” I say. “Too hot in here.”

Outside is instant relief, but cold. I am not alone. All along the railing are others, all staring blankly at the water. But out here the rolling makes sense. The draw of the hull rises and then lowers as the ship cuts through each new wave; and when the hull sinks sea foams away in hissing swells. I can see progress here and feel better for it.

There is nothing in the distance. Already dark, there is neither light nor line to be seen. This, I suppose, is the Baltic Sea. I had envisioned it for years, all because of the small bronzed plaque on the back wall of St. Martin's with the names of the four Pomeranian boys who died in World War II.
Boys
. I imagine that it is the first time I have thought of them like that. When I was a boy their pictures turned them into men, their glory made them heroes. When I was their ages — nineteen, twenty-one, two were twenty-two — they seemed removed, lost, like old newsreels, their hair wrong, their faint moustaches goofy; they seemed somehow still older. Now, though, I am thirty-six. Old enough to be a big brother, an uncle, perhaps even a father to the youngest of them. I think I remember the quotation: “… lost in action somewhere over the Baltic Sea, August 26, 1942.”
Somewhere
. Here maybe? I look out into the black nothing and wonder if Pomerania has come to this spot twice. Why else would I think of it? He was a Dombrowski. Perhaps Lucy's uncle. Dead at nineteen. When I was nineteen years old I showed up at my first NHL training camp, the world by the ass. And now look: we both end up here.
Felix Batterinski, lost in action somewhere over the Baltic Sea
, December the what? 1981 …