The Last Season (46 page)

I fall into her mouth, pushing, being swallowed, our tongues arguing for space. My hands fall along both sides of her, in and then out, the curves leading on. I turn inside, rubbing, circling, rubbing, opening. I move into Kristiina and away from the world. I am the squirrel reaching the stone fence, the partridge turning into the spruce. I am Batterinski, running from his own creation.

At 3:00 a.m. the radio buzzes and skips into all-night programming. I awake and realize I am still hiding in Kristiina, her arms and legs around me, my own legs tucked up like a baby's. I resent moving, but I know now I will be able to reach Poppa. Finally. He will have to be at home now.

The line crackles, spits and hums with distance, but I am walking down Batterinski Road once the first ring sounds — one long, two short; one long, two short; one long, two short — and I can sense Poppa moving in from the kitchen, his long thin finger twisting and reaming an ear so he will hear better. For Poppa the telephone remains an invention, not a necessity, and he still treats it as if he is being marked on performance.

“Ahh — Yallo.”

“Poppa! It's me!”

“That you, Felix?” he shouts.
Dat.
Yes, dis is me.

“I got your telegram, Poppa.”

“I tried to phone.”

“I was in Leningrad.”

“Russia?”

“Yes.”

“
What
were you doing in Russia?”

“We had a game. They telegrammed from the team office here.”

“That was good of them.”
Dat. Dem.

“You sound worried.”

“Didn't they tell you your Batcha was dead, Felix?”

“Yes. When?”

“Early yesterday. Funeral's tomorrow. She's in Renfrew.”

“In Renfrew? Why there?”

“Can't have her here. Place's burned pretty bad.”

“Burned!
What do you mean burned?”

“The house. They told you that, didn't they?”

“No! Nothing. What happened?”

“Your Batcha died in the fire, son.”

Batcha? In a fire? What is going on here?
I sit down, legs buckling.

“Not cancer?”

“No. The shed caught fire and I wasn't here. I saw the smoke and came running, but I couldn't do much. We almost lost the house. Shed's all gutted. I dragged Batcha free, but it was too late. Couldn't save her.”

“What was she doing there?”

“She tried to put it out herself. But she was too old, eh? I'm too old too. I got burnt pretty bad myself.”

“You?”

“My right arm. Don't worry. I'll be all right.”

“How badly burned are you? Tell me, Poppa.”

“I'm okay.”

“How bad?”

“I can't use the arm. My eye got it a bit too.”

“I'm coming home, Poppa.”

“You don't have to, son. Jan's helping. We can handle it all.”

“The hell you can. I'm coming home.”

“The funeral's tomorrow.”

I can tell how desperately he wants me to come. He wouldn't ask. He wouldn't even hint if he didn't need me. “I'm not sure I can make it. I'll try. I pick up six hours remember.”

“You're sure you want to do this?”

“I'm sure.”

“If you're sure, then, your Poppa would be grateful.”

“I want to do it, Poppa.'

“Can I ask you a favour?”

A favour?
What has he already asked?

“Anything.”

“Will you bring back the letters I sent you?”

“The letters?”

“Not the letters from me. Jaja's memoirs, okay? Forget the other stuff, but would you bring back the stuff Marie typed for you?”

I can't!
I don't have them! They're in Leningrad.

“Yah, sure.”

“God bless you, my son.”

“I'll call you when I get in,” I say.

“I will pray for a safe flight,” he says.

“Goodbye, Poppa.”

“Thank you, Felix.”

“Goodbye.”

I leave Kristiina sleeping and with a small note tucked between her legs, where I am certain good memories of Batterinski will remain forever. She will find it in the morning and read it over coffee.

My dearest, sweetest Kristiina,

My father needs me, as I suspected. My grandmother died not of the cancer but in a fire that also burned my father, though not badly. I must go and help and I know you will understand better than anyone. I have a predawn flight and decided not to wake you. But I kissed you on the lips, and also here, while you slept. I love you dearly, my darling. And since I cannot find the courage to ask in person, do you think you could ever imagine yourself married to a big galoot like me? Nothing would please me more, you know it.

I love you forever,

Felix

The phone rings while I pack back at the Inter-Continental and I grab the first two calls thinking it is Kristiina, who might have discovered the note. But it is the press both times. I put the receiver back without even admitting it is me. The ringing continues off and on, but I refuse to answer. What the hell does it matter? To them, a dead line is as good as an interview anyway:
“Batterinski was not available for comment, but returned home to Canada on a morning flight, claiming pressing family business.”

The flight is calm, the skies open well out into the North Sea. For the longest time I simply stare down, watching the shoreline recede beneath me. I feel Finland drawing itself back into my past, the first statistics I have accumulated that have nothing to do with the rep, but everything to do with the future. A single number, one, Kristiina. And with dawn creasing and her rising to find my offer tucked so gently between her thighs, it may well be that Batterinski no longer has to stand alone. Hockey may well be over. Life may finally be beginning.

“How can one who has not passed through the experience hope then to pass on what it was like? When have we ever had a player who could articulate the pain of the end? What was it Felix Batterinski felt as he flew from disaster in Helsinki toward further horrors at home? He had to know it was over. There would be no more cheering.

Driving up through the Ottawa Valley toward Pomerania for the funeral, Batterinski would have driven through the lumber towns where he had often played hockey as a youngster. Long before he was born, however, the Ottawa Valley was home for the great hockey legend known as the ‘The Shawville Express,' Frank Finnigan, whom it's almost certain a man with Batterinski's education would never have heard of. But Finnigan, like Batterinski, was a hero in these same small towns, 50 years earlier. And when it was over, as for Batterinski, there was nothing. Finnigan's daughter, Joan, would one day try to put it in a poem she called ‘Grey Is the Forelock Now of the Irishman.'

‘... I remember my father, too,

In the headlines.

on the gum cards, in the

rotogravure,

and how, in the pasture, there

was nothing

to change but shadows and,

in the dark beyond night,

bright enormous butterflies

crossing the moon

of his disenchanted vision; I

heard him cry out to them

in another room but they

stayed in his eyes

until we were all well-marked

by the days

of his going down into ruin.

‘Wrinkled now is the brow of

My all-star father

standing in the doorway

of the house of his grandsons

who yet must learn,

in smaller forums and with less

limelight,

how heroes are really made.'

Going to find Felix Batterinski that day in Pomerania, I remember thinking there were neither children nor grandchildren who would one day try to come to terms with him. There was only me.”

— Excerpted by permission from “Batterinski's Burden” by Matt Keening,
Canada Magazine
, June 1982

P
omerania
is in thaw, as I drive down Black Donald Hill, down past the hardware store and Hatkoski's barber shop, down toward what used to be the White Rose station and the turn, the kids playing up the Schama side road decide to burst their dam. They came running downhill alongside it, the water racing below the ice lip, them sliding above on the final crust. It bursts through the lowest slush ridge and out over Highway 60, and I have to slow to let them cross, five youngsters in mud-soaked mittens, toques pushed high on their heads, five future river-runners for the mills. If only they still used river-runners.

It looks like a war movie. I have to leave the rented car at Jazda's and hike the rest of the way in, sticking to the high side and hanging on to wet alders to keep from sinking through the thick crystal of the plough banks. Twice I break through badly, once losing a boot which I must root for with a branch. On the first corner past Jazda's I see where Poppa has tried to run it in the half-ton but sunk through to the axles. His steps, wide-spaced and deliberate, are still punctured in the cold muck leading away from the door. I step in his tracks the rest of the way home.

There is no mistaking the fire. I see exactly what happened as soon as I get to the laneway. The shed is badly burned but still standing on the house side, though Poppa's green siding has been charred. Yet more than seeing things, I can smell. A smell sadder than burning leaves, the ugly smell of a mistake. Oil and paint, certainly. Cloth, perhaps. Shingles. Plastic. But none of these describe how rancid the smell is in total.

Batcha? Could it be her?

Poppa is inside, trying to measure out coffee, and when he turns to the sound of the opening door it is as if I have come upon a stranger pretending to be Poppa. It is not just his arm that is wrong, but his whole side. Above the ear the hair has been burnt away, the ear and exposed flesh glowing red and glistening with Vaseline. Over one eye there is no eyebrow, just a swollen, whitish ridge. He drops the spoon, staring at it momentarily as if someone else has thrown it, then carefully holds the arm in tight and comes toward me. We say nothing. He hugs with his good arm and I touch as if he has been constructed of newspaper and flour glue.

“You're hurt, Poppa,” I say, my voice thin and stretched.

“I'm okay,” he says. “It just hurts to touch. The air is good on it.”

“How did it happen?”

Poppa seems reluctant to say. He backs away, back toward the kitchen and the pot of hot water. “I'm making coffee,” he says. “You?”

“Yah, me.”

But he cannot handle two cups. I move in and take over and he makes no protest. He sits in his usual chair, taking care not to let the arm brush the table or the backs of the other chairs. When his weight shifts he winces, and he sounds short of breath.

“You'd better tell me,” I say.

“I had to drag her out,” he says, voice swollen as his face. He speaks slowly, but not from reluctance. He wants to tell. “Her clothes were on fire and I tried to roll on her. It was pouring rain ... and there was still plenty of snow. But it was no good. She never came around. I thank God for that fire extinguisher you put in. I saved the house anyway.”

“I saw the truck on the way in. Were you going for help?”

“She was already dead. I wanted her buried from here. I thought maybe I could open the road.”

“How did they get her out?”

“Jazda's snowmobile. He's been good to me. Jan's been good. You been good coming like this.”

Dis
. And so I am home. The calendars still flutter on the wall from the slight furnace draft, Poppa sits with his coffee staring into the back of the cereal boxes, and I sit in my old chair at the far end, overloading my cup with sugar, stirring slowly, thinking. It's as if I just stepped in from setting some new shiners in the minnow pool. But eighteen hours ago I was in Helsinki, twelve hours before that in the Soviet Union. I have crossed nearly half of the world to be here. I have been body-searched, outraged, nearly arrested, deceived, attacked, laid and have asked a woman to marry me. But yet I have nothing to say to my own father about any of it.

“You've had some calls,” Poppa says matter-of-factly. It could be me just in from the minnows. It could be Danny on the phone with word the smelts are running.

“Oh? From where?”

“From over there.” He indicates the pump with his thumb. He means Finland. “Person-to-person. I could hardly understand them.”

“How many?”

“Three. Twice in the middle of the night.”

“Sorry.”

Poppa looks up, worried. “No trouble, I hope.”

I shake my head. “They were probably just trying to let me know the score.”

“You didn't play in Russia?”

“No I left before.”

Poppa looks more upset with this than with the fire. “I hope they gave those bastards what for.”

“They would have tried, Poppa. I'm going to look in the shed, okay?”

I get up. Poppa doesn't move; he doesn't even turn in his seat because of the pain; instead, he speaks straight ahead, as if I am still there. “There's not much to see,” he says.

But he is wrong. The shed has become a black shell of the Batterinski years here. Poppa has been moving about in it, his gumboots by the doorway caked grey with soot and his trail through the debris marked by periodic sweeps where he has kicked at things. The rain has hardened the ashes and I can see precisely where he went, but not whether the kicks were in anger or in search of things. The house wall is hardly touched, the old harnesses, lamps, snowshoes, found wire, coats, cables and rusted tools still hanging on their spikes. But the far wall is gone entirely, the charred frame only hinting at what was once there. Poppa's .22 lies in the soot, the stock now as narrow and black as the barrel. There are ragged coats, tarpaulins, charred canthooks, rakes, a fishnet, meaningless without its string, dozens of burned and wrinkled magazines, their pages buckled and twisted as if trying to escape, newspaper scraps, wooden boxes, cardboard trunks, burst tins, paint cans, bottles, sealer jars and, everywhere, small scraps of paper — a corner, a half page, almost an entire page — but whatever was once on it erased by the fire or faded to nothing by the rain.

Behind me the door kicks open again and Poppa steps onto the ledge in his grey socks, a sweater loosely draped over his injured arm and held away from the skin by his good hand.

“A hell of a mess, eh?” he says sadly.

“How did it start?”

“I don't know. Spontaneous combustion, I suppose. Place was full of rags and old paint tins.”

“You're damn lucky the house didn't catch.”

“Yah,” he says half-heartedly.

“Mostly junk here anyway,” I say.

Poppa says nothing. I kick a burnt crate and when I look back at him his eyes are glassy. The wind? The burn?

“Are you okay, Poppa?”

“We lost Jaja's memoirs, Felix.”

His mouth trembles and he looks down and away, not wanting me to see.

“What do you mean you ‘lost' them?”

Poppa shouts, impatient. “They
burnt
! The fire got them. They're gone!”

“I don't understand. “What were they doing out here?”

“We stacked them here as we finished. We were almost finished.”

“You lost
everything?”

“There's one box in the basement still.”

I breathe easier. “Thank God.”

“Don't bother,” he says. “It's just the financial records. All the history was out here.”

I am afraid to look at him. His voice tells me he cannot keep back the tears.

“I thought Marie was getting copies in Renfrew.”

“She was, but just of what was sent to you. It was here, too. We never thought — we should never have been so stupid.”

I go over and nudge one of the box skeletons with my toe. Inside there is mostly ash, but a few papers remain, pasted along the side with ash and ice. They have their form, almost, but none of their content.

“I'm just glad we at least have your copies,” Poppa says to my back.

My back answers him, head nodding, lying, afraid to turn.

Bless the telephone. Before Poppa can move on to ask to see the letters (“Tell me, Poppa, have you ever heard of Pulkova airport?”) a one long, two short gives me a chance to duck past him and in the back door. “Must be Jan now,” he says as I pass.

But it is not. It is a person-to-person, from Finland.

“Yes, you're talking to him,” I say.

Vaguely I hear something in Finnish, then a switching and a voice, suddenly loud.

“Felix Batterinski?”

“Yes.”

I catch the first name — Voitto — but not the second, and the newspaper,
Sanomat.
He says we have spoken many times before and I am sure we have, but that is for him to remember, not me.

“Erkki Sundstrom has admitted the penalty pay-offs were paid,” the voice says. “But he says that you originated the idea.”

“He does, does he?”

“Yes, he does. May I ask for a comment?”

Poppa has come through the door and stares at me as he carefully sets down the sweater. I pretend I'm having a hard time hearing and wave him away. Good old Poppa: he walks through the kitchen and out into the front room, closing the door behind him until it binds on the lay of the floor. I hear him on the stairs.

“Who called them ‘penalty pay-offs,' Voitto?”

“They are referred to as that here. It is a bit of a national scandal, you see. You were the subject of a wild debate in our parliament today.”

“For what?”

“Many Finns are very upset about your bringing North American tactics to Finland.”

“Are they interested in making your hockey better?”

Voitto laughs. “May I quote you on that?”

“Sure. Finnish hockey players have all the skills but one. They can skate, pass, shoot — but they show no heart. All I did was try to give them heart.”

“Some would say that it isn't something you can buy.”

“We made the playoffs, didn't we? A team everyone laughed at the first of the year — everyone including yourself, if I remember correctly.” I do not remember at all, but I do know that what one sportswriter thinks, they all think.

“Yes,” Voitto says, hoping to entrap me with his ready laugh. “I did. But the question is whether making the playoffs is justification enough for paying for penalties.”

“Aha — but I have never said we paid for penalties, have I?”

“Sundstrom admits it is so.”

“Then it is just one other thing that poor bastard doesn't understand. I wanted a simple bonus system for hard play, that's all. Show a little heart and we'll reward you. But it is a lie to say we
paid
players to take penalties.”

“Sundstrom has produced a score sheet though, so much money for this, so much for that.”

That bastard jerk Erkki.

“Well, we had to have some way to measure aggressiveness.”

“I see. But you still deny the charges.”

There's no way Jerkki is getting away with this. “I go by whatever Erkki says. We were in it together, completely, and as a manager he's far better able to comment on it than I am. The coach just follows orders. And you can quote me on that too.”

“I will. And thank you very much.”

“Just a second. Do you know the score from the other night?”

“The Leningrad game?”

“Yes. Do you have it?”

“Yes. Just a second. It's here, somewhere.” I can hear him calling in Finnish over the muffled phone. He comes back on but I do not think I hear him right.

“Again?”

“12–1.”

I hang up, smiling. I do not need to ask who scored the twelve.

I hear Poppa on the stairs, then cracking back the door. He seems unsure of himself. His hand shakes as he loosens the chiselled hole that never received a knob. I am suddenly struck by how old he is — seventy-seven. He now stoops worse than Jaja ever did. His mouth precedes his speech, like an out-of-synch movie.

“What was it, son?”

“Nothing, Poppa. Just some business with the team. They're going to be drafting next week. They need some idea on who to go after, eh?”

Poppa smiles, satisfied. “Build with youth, son. Just like the Islanders.”

“Yah,” I say. I cannot believe Poppa knows what he is saying. I am older now as a hockey player than he is as a human. As of this telephone call, Batterinski is dead.

The coffin is closed. Considering how Poppa looks after just trying to beat the fire from the bitch, I assume she is little more than caked ash herself. I cannot look at the box without feeling her hatred for me. Poppa dragged me over to see the wreath sitting on the head of the casket; I found it difficult to swallow — not from sorrow, but from my own anger. The wreath had a red ribbon banner with
FAMILY
etched in green, but I could not feel it had come from anyone but him. Batcha never was my flesh and blood, never will be.

Poppa said it was no way to die, but what way is there? Would she have preferred the cancer? Or Ig's way, staring down the road at a half-ton and a windshield full of his nephew's laughing, drunken friends? Or Jaja — the last thing he heard the squawk of chickens, their wings offering wind for his fall? Or Matka, knowing that my cry should have been hers? How can he say that,
no way to die?
Batcha is dead and I, quite frankly, don't give a sweet damn about her. I have come for Poppa's sake, not the bitch's.

There are so many others in the room now, and I know them all and also not at all. Uncle Jan, Cousin Jazda, Schama, Shannon, Murray, Toposki, Batterinski, Father Schula, Dombrowski, Hatkoski — and as I stare at them or shake their hands I sense that they are much the same as before, though worn. Like the newspapers Poppa stacked in the shed: discoloured, wrinkled but filled with the same words. Uncle Jan and I talk about how it was and what a shame it was about Batcha, and eventually he gets around to the one thing he wants to talk about: is Gretzky better then Orr? There is no comparison, I say, and leave him to make his own.