The Last Season (37 page)

And feed them I did. Some of the faces I knew from past experience: Donovan, from the drunk at the cottage, which made me think of Ig, Tiny Fetterly and one of the Lacha boys, but not, thank God, the driver of the half-ton that day, a couple of the Palowskis, one I think being Dominic from our old days on Father Schula's church team.

Naturally, they wanted to talk hockey. We went quickly through the standard beer talk, me sleepwalking through their so-called “inside dope” and Danny paying very little attention at all until I made the mistake of pausing to order some more draft.

“Bats,” Danny said, suddenly attentive. “Do you ever think of Maureen the Queen?”

I was tempted to him about her as she is today. But he was already stuck in Vernon, yesterday. “Constantly,” I said.

Danny took over then. He told the Maureen the Queen story in a version that made me sound like Henry Miller and him like the Marquis de Sade. From that he slipped easily into his glorified history of our hockey days in Vernon, leading naturally to: “What do you really think, Bats, could old Shannon have made the big leagues if he'd kept at it?”

This was no place to discuss Sugar's concept of “heart.”

“You might,” I said.

“
Might?
What kind of answer is that,
might?
”

“Well, it depends.”

“Danny was drunk. “Depends on what?”

“I'm no scout.”

“You played with me. Come on — was I any damn good at all?”

“Sure you were good.”

“How good?”

“I guess.”

Danny sat back, satisfied. He had what he needed for the table, however vaguely I might have put it. By tomorrow it would be
Batterinski says Danny might have made it.
By next week it would be
Danny threw away a career in the
NHL
to stay here.
Danny would not even have to work on it himself; the others would do the work for him, all of them just as eager as Danny to agree, to believe that Pomerania had something to offer that the National Hockey League had not. Danny, after all, had
chosen
to stay.

How could I say what I was really thinking: that both were dead ends. How could they possibly believe a guy who had a brand-new $700,000 contract in hand, a new Corvette parked outside, clothes, friends, California, did not have it made forever?

“You guess what?” a thick, deep voice said from the far side of the second table. I leaned and looked. Almost out of view a thick, dark man in a Renfrew hockey jacket was staring at me, his eyebrows challenging, his mouth open and wet with drink, and surly.

I smiled. “I guess he could have played,” I said.

“Danny Shannon's too fat to have played in the NHL,” the man said contemptuously.

Danny laughed, once.

Danny didn't used to be fat,” I said.

The man responded with his nose, an arching, accusing snort, his eyes closed. When the eyes open again they seemed to have gathered more ammunition and were ready to attack again. I felt defensive about my old friend, even though he had put me in this awkward position. “Danny Shannon had moves like you wouldn't believe, pal,” I said, my own voice a little surly.

The eyes tapered in on me, testing. From the side Danny spoke: “Forget it, Bats. It doesn't matter.” He spoke with the tone old and familiar: beware.

I left it alone. There was a mumble from the other table and then silence. Danny picked up the slack by moving into the Orr stories, but thanks to a few minor revisions, this time Orr was invariably flattened as he crossed the blueline, either by Danny's stick or my hip. Danny even had a new story worked out, this one about his shot, which now seemed somewhere in the special league reserved for the Hull brothers. Danny claimed to have taken a slapshot — “Now this is before Mikita and the curved blade, eh?” — in a game against Parry Sound that struck square against the crossbar, shattering it into fifty pieces or more. I knew where Danny had taken the story from — I did it myself, with an overly frozen puck at a bitterly cold Vernon practice — but where the gall to take it for himself came from I couldn't imagine. The way I remembered it, Danny had a shot you could time with a calendar.

But I let him have his lie and took time to survey the growing faces around the tables. The bitcher was still there, his brow nodding helplessly down toward an empty beer. He sat with his hands folded on his chest, coffin-like, but looked anything but dead: the arms were powerful, the hands thick and calloused and heavily scabbed around the knuckles from his last argument. If we were lucky, he's pass out soon.

Not counting me, sitting dead centre, there were twelve gathered at the Opeongo Hotel. Nine guys and three women, but it may just as well have been nine men alone. Not one of the women had said a single word, though two were animated in their laughter and one, in particular, kept looking at me with that stare I usually find in the anxious distance between arena side doors and team buses. Whether the three were wives, girlfriends or simply strangers who could find no table space anywhere it was impossible to say. They sat there and the men talked to each other, leaning back to speak around a woman, at times shouting right through them like they were thick underbush. When the men laughed, the women laughed, though I suspected at the cue rather than the joke. They were allowed at the table the same as the salt shakers were, though the salt shakers received more contact.

I had almost forgotten how women were treated in my old world. No one in Pomerania was arguing about whether God was a “He” or “She.” God here was “Force,” and the only sexual connotation a Pomeranian could count on was that every once in a while this force was going to throw a fuck their way. There was no Californian “I can see where you're coming from” in this room. No empathy, support for the Equal Rights Amendment, marches against rape, lesbian press conferences ... in Pomerania women were just another form of wildlife, yours to do with as you will. Worship, screw, beat, ignore — it's your business alone.

“How ‘bout
you?
”

“Huh?” I turned quickly to answer the hand on my shoulder and the thick voice, the same voice that had challenged Danny's revised hockey career. He was staring at me like I was someone else's newspaper, just out of sight. His eyes seemed unfocused, filled with nothing but barely controlled rage.

“Arm wrestle?”

I looked behind him. While Danny had been lying and I drifting, a table behind us had been cleared off and several burly men, some with cut-off jean jackets and cheap tattoos, most with sixties haircuts that had been last washed in that decade, were all waiting for my answer.

“Well?” he growled.

I shook my head. “No thanks.”

“Chickenshit.”

I looked at Danny. Subtly, he shook his head in further warning. “I'm just going to have a drink with my friends here,” I explained to the man, careful to smooth any possible edge from my voice.

“You're supposed to be the tough hockey player. Let's see what you're made of.”

I again tried patience. “Sorry. I don't need that.”

“I got five bucks says you're nothing, Batterinski.”

Patience gone, I slapped my hands on my thighs and stood. “Let's get it over with,” I said.

As quickly as I stood, the tables emptied and formed a circle around us. A bull terrier pit. I sat and steadied my hand, waiting for him. He sat, surly mouth twisting into a sad victory smile, and as soon as he reached to take my hand I knew I had him.

“Any time,” I said, deliberately filling my voice with boredom.

He hit hard and fast, a bass trying to break a lure against the current. I let him have some line, too, allowing my arm to sag back and fool him into putting full force into his lunge for a lucky, fast victory. He poured his rage into the arm, practically rising out of his seat as he went full out of it. But I held. And when I looked up at him I saw his brow folded into itself, his face popping with blood, the tapering eyes retreating in panic. I smiled.

Slowly, deliberately, I brought our arms even by fractions. When we steepled I smiled for everyone and winked at Danny, then surged once through my arm and flattened him instantly, the back of his wrist cracking loudly against the table, just in case anyone had any doubts.

“Five,” I said, and held out my hand.

His second handed the bill to me quickly. I took it and, anxious to avert any return match or second challenge, turned back to our own table and raised my hand for another tray of beer, throwing the five into the dwindling pot.

Danny continued to drink heavily until he was so drunk I was sure I'd have to carry him home and tuck him in with Lucy. I was not in such good shape myself. A rolling wall in the washroom convinced me it was time to quit, and when I came out, Danny was face down on the table snoring. I picked him up from behind, shook him a bit to wake him, and then helped him hobble out onto the porch, where he stood singing and pissing the length of the steps. He finished, half put himself away and took a step into space that would have ended with a broken neck had I not caught him. I hadn't expected him to be so heavy, and he dragged both of us, stumbling, down five steps, but I managed to get his arm up around my neck and, lifting and dragging, down the steps and off toward the car.

I thought it was Danny's hand at my neck. But then the voice.

“I'll have my five back, asshole.”

Danny straightened up, suddenly capable.

“Fuck off, Patterson,” Danny said.

“I want my money.”

“You bet it. You lost it,” Danny said.

“I got fuckin' tricked.”

I had said nothing. The arm wrestler, Patterson, was reeling on his feet. He was not after his money, but his pride.

“Go home and sleep it off,” I advised in as rational and as comforting voice as I could manage. I pulled out my wallet and searched a five out in the moonlight. “Here,” I said, crumpling the money and pressing it into his hand. “Take it. I sure as shit don't need it.”

Patterson let the bill drop, kicking it away, and then rushed me, using his thick head like a football helmet on my ribs. The blow knocked me staggering, and when I stepped back I saw that Patterson's friends were moving out from behind the cars and hotel. They again formed a ring.

If I stuck fast, I thought, they might panic.

Patterson was watching me with contempt, hoping the head butt would be enough, that Batterinski would slink away with his useless friend, and one day Patterson's brawl would take on the same magic as Danny's short hockey career,
You know that Batterinski that used to play for the Flyers, eh? Tough cop, eh? Patterson cleaned that asshole's clock right here, right outside this very hotel. I seen it, eh? Batterinski was never the same after that, eh?

With Danny shaking his head at me I shot right through his warning and landed a boot — loafers, for Christ's sake! — in his gut. Patterson bent double and I hit him with both hands together right across the face, spinning him backwards onto his back. I leaped so I landed on him, kneeing his shoulders back against the ground, and grabbed his hair in one hand and raised the other in a fist. His eyes focused clearly now, the rage buckled by terror.

Time slowed marvellously, the warmth surging through me and the sting in my hands as sharp as freezing rain on my cheek. I could see he was bleeding heavily from the mouth where his teeth had gone into his lower lip. When he tried to talk the blood bubbled and he had to spit first.

“Lay off,” Patterson begged. “I'm hurt, okay?”

I stepped off slowly, watching his friends. But no one moved. Danny was steadier now and we backed off quickly, me with both hands out so they would know I was ready for anything they might care to try. Batterinski was leaving as a favour, not in panic. Batterinski had complete control.

When we turned at the corner and vanished toward the car I lifted my face into the night air and drank deep from it. I felt better than at any moment since I had entered the tunnel at Detroit.

I helped Danny into the car and shut the door on him, and by the time I came around to my side he was already screaming from within. I opened on: “— fuckin' showed him, man. Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit it was beautiful, Bats! That asshole finally got his. You're a fuckin' hero, man!”

All the way back to Danny's I wondered. By the time I helped him in through the front door and closed it after him I believed otherwise. I stood for a moment staring up at the quarter-moon and the stars and I knew that Patterson, whoever he was, had simply taken a run at Batterinski for every person in the bar. Probably Danny Shannon included. Perhaps even for Batterinski himself.

After that I stayed away from Danny and the bars and even the village itself. I ran every morning, always five miles and usually down the other direction on Batterinski Road where it entered the tamarack swamp and quickly faded from the washboardy gravel road to a one-vehicle-wide path with a high mound of fractured grass in the middle.

I ran before breakfast, the late summer fog clammy on my face and hands, and then the sun, when it burned through, like a comforter in the personal hours of a sleepless night. It was a most peculiar feeling to be a shadow slipping, slapping, grunting along in the fog, my skin defining the limits of space, the trail seeming to run at me rather than I at it. I could not tell where the fog would end and the sunshine begin, and entering sun patches felt much like bursting through a wall.

Several times I frightened myself, twice coming across partridge scratching in the fog, and having them explode in my face, twisting toward the spruce, and once I almost landed on two fox kittens who froze in terror as I materialized suddenly and then was gone, re-entering the fog.

On the final morning of my ten days back home, the fog lay stubborn along the swamp trail. But I had come to like it this way, the fog like a defender hacking away at me as I picked up speed to stay just out of reach, eyes alert to whatever might spring from the fog, knees ready to pivot instantly, no matter what the surprise. It was hockey. I had to have my arms alert to push off spruce and drooping raspberry. I fancied I might come across a mother bear ready to swat me away from her cubs, perhaps a wolf standing over a rabbit, thinking I had come to swipe the kill. This unknown gave what would have been an otherwise boring run the dimension it lacked: a test of reflex. Rather than running, as others did, to raise my heartbeat to some ridiculous number minus my age, I ran to keep up with my heart.