The Last Season (4 page)

Danny always talked about how quickly things take place. “He never even saw the puck,” he'd say. But it was never so with me. I was like Willoughby's recording of “The Queen.” When attention was on me, time slowed down. In a fight, I relaxed. I could sit in the dressing room in the hours before a game and twitch so bad sometimes a foot would jump right off the floor. But when my defenceman charged I was aware even of my own breathing. He came in flailing, but to me it was like watching someone swim toward me doing the crawl. I could sense his intention and I could feel his blind fury. When I had him about the waist it almost felt as if I was comforting him. That I didn't just keep squeezing until his own insides poured out his mouth was an act of charity. I put him down and I ended his humiliation quickly for him, even hiding his face under his sweater when it happened. He should have thanked me.

The horn went to signal the end of the game and Danny was first to confirm what I already knew

“Ugga-bugga!” Danny shouted. His victory call. “Five-four for us, Bats.”

I smiled. The rest poured in, shouting, slapping, tossing sticks and gloves. As they passed by they looked with the respect of the leeches but had no fear in touching, which I was glad for. I felt their hands and their sticks praising me.

“You fucking near killed that twit, Bats!”

“I heard the ambulance.”

“Best check of the season.”

“You turned it around, Bats old fart.”

I said nothing in return. I sat there, completely dressed but for my gloves at my feet and felt no different than if I was lying in bed on a Saturday morning. The trainer, Biff, came in with a tray of Pepsi and made sure I got mine first. Then came Sugar, making like he was scribbling the final score down on his clipboard in case he'd somehow forget. He stopped, looked with the good black eye and winked it.

“Teddy Roosevelt,” he said.

I said nothing, just smiled and looked down and began undressing slowly. Not undressing, more like dismantling: sweater, elbow pads, shoulder pads, lift off the braces, take off the skates, pants, undo garter, socks, shin pads, jock. Each piece dropped off with reluctance. If only the people who saw me on the street could see me in full uniform, the big “A” over the heart, the number “
7
,” the tuck of my sweater into the back of my pants. I knew the uniform spoke better for me than I did myself.

Coming out of the shower Sugar reached out and caught my arm, turning me toward him. He whispered:

“That your dad waiting out there?”

Danny! The son-of-a-bitch.

“Yes.”

“You want me to call him in?”

I shook my head. Sugar hung his thick lower lip out and nodded his understanding.

When I was dressed though, Sugar insisted on leaving the dressing room with me. Poppa was outside, leaning on the nearest edge of the snack counter, chewing on a Coffee Crisp like a little kid. There were chocolate and wafer crumbs all over his chin and front.

“Mr. Batterinski?” Sugar said before I could say a word.

Poppa looked like he was about to get into trouble with the law.

“Yes?”

“I'm Ted Bowles, sir. Felix's coach. Delighted to meet you.”

Poppa took Sugar's hand like it was some sort of trick. I began praying he would say nothing with “th” in it.

“How'd you like the game?” Sugar asked.

“Yes.” Poppa said, brushing the crumbs off his chin like he hadn't properly heard the questions. “Some of it.”

“Your boy here,” Sugar said, smiling, “he turned it around for us.”

Poppa looked startled. “He did?”

“Sure he did. We were flat as pancakes before he shook things up.” Sugar smacked me on the back of the head, reaching up to rub his knuckles into my brushcut. I knew I was turning red. “You got anymore like this back at home, Mr. Batterinski?” Sugar asked.

“No. Sorry.” Poppa said it as if he was actually at fault. He shifted restlessly, anxious for dismissal. I kicked a Pepsi cup, then looked up to see Mr. Riley's shock of red hair just off to the side behind Poppa, he and his nervous wife both standing there, grinning widely and waiting to meet the bumpkin.

“Way to go there, Felix,” Mr. Riley shouted, but not looking at me, at Poppa. Poppa turned, startled.

“Des Riley, Mr. Batterinski,” Mr. Riley said, introducing himself. “This here's the wife.”

Poppa nodded at Mrs. Riley and tentatively shook hands with Mr. Riley. The Rileys looked as if they were dressed for church his suit and tie indicative of his rising position on the local hockey executive. She had on her black wool coat with the beaver collar and her knitted hat. She was offering one of her tight smiles and nodding, but as I knew from past experience, not listening. Her only true interest lay in the church and Mary Maxim patterns.

“You should be very proud of Felix,” said Mr. Riley. “He's a fine young man.”

“Felix should not fight.”

“Ah,” Mr. Riley snorted, as if it were a point of utter insignificance.

“He never started it. But he sure as heck finished it, eh?” Mr. Riley laughed loudly and looked around for approval.

“He's a good boy,” Poppa said, and that seemed to satisfy everyone. But he meant it, I thought, in argument.

Sugar gave me another whack, reached over and shook Poppa's hand again and moved on into the leeches who were waiting to go over the game with him, as if the game could not be fact until they all agreed they'd seen the same thing. Well, at least this time I knew they'd have a good fight to talk about. I began to move away myself, but Poppa surprised me by starting up again.

“He goes to mass?” he asked Mrs. Riley directly. She tried to speak but her mouth wouldn't work. No one in the arena had ever spoken to her in preference to her husband before. He spoke for her anyway.

“Sure he does. You've no worries there, Mr. Batterinski.”

“His first coach,” Poppa said, “Father Schula, he wants Felix and Danny Shannon to serve Christmas Mass.”

“Wonderful,” Mr. Riley said, looking at me with pride. “They're both fine boys.”

“I know.”

“No trouble with them two.”

School was to let out December 21, a day so bitterly cold the smoke rose above the boiler room like toothpaste from the tube. The windows in geography class were thick with frost so that at first we could only hear the ambulance siren as it bounced around the skinny pass between the shop entrance and the main building. The sound was so loud that Mrs. Hay couldn't continue, and eventually even she went to the windows and began rubbing with her hand to see what all the fuss was about.

It was a bit like looking underwater when the frost melted, but I was able to see the ambulance pull up just beyond the shop by the teachers' parking lot and cut the siren. And I could see both Old Man Morgan and the vice principal, Biggins, holding what seemed to be a pail of steaming water. They were standing near the rear of Morgan's three-tone Ford Fairlane, and they were bending over looking at something.

It was Danny Shannon.

He was right up to the side of the car like he was leaning into it. And he was screeching. I could hear him all that distance, his own siren wailing away. I thought at first Morgan must have driven over his foot and stopped on top of it, but that didn't make sense. He would have moved the car by now.

“Away from the windows, class,” Mrs. Hay called, her voice rising shrilly. “Immmmeeeed-iately!”

“I still got the bastard,” Danny said later when I went to visit him in the hospital. It seemed like a foolish boast, considering months of detentions he'd picked up and the great bandage that lay between his legs.

“It was pretty dumb,” I said.

“I didn't figure on the cold,” he said. “All I meant to do was piss in his gas tank and get out of there. How'd I know I'd stick to his goddamn gas tank. It was colder'n I thought, eh?”

“I still say it was pretty stupid.”

“It'll ruin his engine,” Danny said, forcing a smile.

“It almost ruined yours,” I said.

“To hell with it,” he said. “I'm quittin' anyway.” I stared at him, not following.

“School!” Danny shouted. “I'm quittin'
school
, asshole.”

“You can't.”

“Fucking right I can. You just watch me, lad.”

“When?”

“Soon's I'm sixteen.”

“You tell your family?”

“I'll tell 'em over the holidays.”

I stared between his legs. “They going to let you out of here?”

Danny just smiled. “I already got my bus ticket — and half a dozen safes to boot.”

I giggled, couldn't help myself. “What the hell for?”

“Lucy Dombrowski, arsehole.”

Danny looked at me as if he couldn't believe I'd question it. I looked at him like I couldn't believe he'd imagine it.

“Look,” he decided to explain. “Sugar told you he thought you could play injured, didn't he?”

He was dead serious.

Danny made the bus home for Christmas, as promised, and he never stopped talking about what was planning to do to poor Lucy until the bus passed into high hills east of Algonquin Park. Here Danny fell asleep, leaving me to sit staring into the bush and seeing nothing but Lucy Dombrowski's marvellous ass wiggling back at me. Danny couldn't possibly be thinking he'd get her, could he? He'd be damned lucky to get a hand on her tit in the condition he was in.

Still, a tit was a tit, and more than Batterinski had touched at fifteen years of age. I was beginning to worry about the chances of going through an entire life pretending you'd done it all when in truth the closest you'd come was
National Geographic
. What if everyone flew around nude in heaven and you didn't know what to do? Would they send you down?

All I wanted was a tit to hold. All I'd wanted for as long as I could remember was to grab one, and I'd never even
seen
a real one. Lots of pictures, but I didn't even know what one would feel like. A cow's udder? Soft and cool like when I stabbed my hand into the bitch's flour bin? Or firm and hot like the Rileys' hot water bottle?

Hard to believe, but the first set of bare tits I ever saw were at Jaja's funeral. Well, not precisely at the funeral, but outside, in Uncle Jan's latest car, a Meteor, I think, and they weren't real tits that you could touch or anything, but you could sure see them when you put your eye up to the plastic steering knob Jan had bought and fitted onto his steering wheel.

Will I ever forget that day? We were supposed to have a squirt practice that morning — it had to be squirt, I was nine — and Jaja said he'd gather up my eggs for me so I could get in, but when I got there the ice was nothing but scab and muck, so Father Schula cancelled and sent us home. Danny and I goofed at lot on the way back trying to open up Sabine Creek early by dropping boulders off the bridge, and by the time I got back for dinner, they had Jaja completely wrapped up tight in a camp blanket on the couch, and Doc Rafferty was sitting at the dining room table filling out papers as calmly as if he was doing a grocery list. And thank Christ he was there too. The bitch lunged at me out of her room screaming,
“Vjeszczi! Vjeszczi!”
— which means something idiotic like “monster” — at me and by the time Poppa and old Doc pulled her away she'd already ripped my neck half off. He had to clean me up with iodine and four stitches, which hurt worse than the original. And there was blood all over my sweater, which I wanted left on so Danny could see.

Uncle Jan was good to me that night. I was upstairs crying about Jaja and moaning about my neck when he came up and scooped me up and took me out to where he already had the Meteor warming up. On the front seat were a couple of Cokes for me and some beer for himself, and while Jozefa, Ig's and Poppa's only sister, and the other women were inside getting ready for
pusta noc
, the empty night, we sat out and listened to the Detroit-Leaf playoff game fading in and out from Toronto, Foster Hewitt in the gondola, which was to me even holier than the heaven I knew Jaja was off to. Uncle Jan grinned through his big moustache, gunned the car, showed me the steering knob and my first set of tits with the interior light, and cursed Lindsay and Howe like we were both grown men and the words were every bit as much mine as his, though of course I never used them. Ever since, when I think of Jan I think of that night, the heat puffing out from under the dash, the sour smell of beer — and tits. I must have forgotten about my neck because I fell asleep before Detroit wrapped up the series. Jan must have carried me up and put me to bed.

Poppa made the bitch apologize in the morning. He took me to her in the death room. She was already in Jaja's rocker, and her not even his real wife, Poppa's and the other's mother. She wasn't even one of us, just a replacement Jaja had brought out from the old country, and now she was acting like she was in charge. She had her black hair back in that tight bun covered with the net, and her lips were shaking like she was about to spit. But she did apologize, even if the words meant nothing compared to the stare of those wolf eyes. I knew she blamed me. And Poppa knew too. He even had Doc Rafferty take me aside and explain how the heart attack could have come at any time, picking eggs or even asleep, that it was no one's fault, and that as far as he was concerned, it was the best way to go, because he'd seen them all. It didn't help through. Batcha hated my guts, plain and simple.

Christ, but I wish Danny had seen Ig that day of the funeral. He wouldn't have made all those cracks at practice if he had, because Ig looked and acted magnificently. But Danny wasn't there to see. Ig had taped-on hair that was a perfect match for his own grey-red horseshoe—you'd almost think Hatkoski the barber had been saving up his sweepings for a special occasion—and Aunt Josepha had taken the time to fold the tape over neatly for him so for once it wasn't shining through. God, he looked great.