The Last Season (47 page)

What is it that happens to uncles? I remember my childhood and how Jan always meant excitement, new gimmicks, candy, pop, a chance to take over the steering wheel, look under the hood, spit from the window. Jan always made me feel special as a kid. But now when I look at him I think only of death. The last few times I have seen him have been at funerals. The Batterinski family has become nothing other than ceremonial, something dragged out in bad times and displayed as proof that at one time, somewhere, for some reason, they were all in this horror together. No wonder they flee and only gather again at the next death. Can this possibly be what Jaja meant when he talked about heritage?

Jan is changed. Thinner, bald now as Ig was, and not even the laugh remains. He pulled up to the Catholic funeral home in a broken down Ford station wagon that rattled and spit through twenty seconds of pre-ignition when he turned it off. And just as the car contradicts my memory, so too does Jan's marriage. He has become quiet and brooding. His wife, Sophia, who I remembered as silent and frightened, is now loud and bossy and known to Poppa as “The Whiner.” Their little girl has grown up, run away from home at sixteen with a cadet from the Petawawa army base and hasn't been heard nor seen in the two years since. Thank God, I say, that Jaja is no longer here to record us.

“Felix.”

The voice is soft, tentative. I turn, expecting the priest.

“Danny!”

He nods and smiles shyly. I am so glad to see him that I want to scream
“Ugga-bugggaaaaa!”
so loud that Aunt Jozefa will scald herself with tea.

Lucy has also come. She has a new dress on and it hides her weight well. No, she has lost some, enough that I wish again that I were coming up behind her with the top down and the FM turned up loud, her seventeen-year-old bottom exhausted from churning down Batterinski Road. When she smiles I see that she has new teeth. A sign of her poor past, of Danny's improved present. The yard foreman's wife gets to hand out the turkeys at Christmas, and by God she better look like the boss's wife when she does it.

I take Danny's hand in mine and it feels like two Dannys. He has stretched himself into a new Renfrew suit that some Toronto retailer has sent to the minors. The lapels are wrong, the wide grey stripes a nudge against Danny's fat, the knees cracked and folded where it has been insulted by a hanger. Lou Myles would be outraged, but Danny thinks he's the cock of the walk. He looks old. The hair is thin as balsam now. If Kristiina saw us standing together now, she would assume I was talking to a friend of my father's. Which I suppose Danny is now. More than mine, anyway.

“Thanks for coming,” I say, after some useless talk.

But Danny shows no sign of moving on. Lucy does, toward the coffee and
placeks
at the far end of the room.

“So,” Danny says, breathing deep, the formalities done with. When he smiles my Danny passes through Poppa's Danny and I smile back, glad to see him finally. “How's she been going for you?”

I pretend it is a thought that has seldom crossed my mind. “Good, I guess.”

“Finland okay?”

“Been great. We got beat out in the playoffs.”

Danny pulls out a cigarette, taps it carefully on the edge of the box. “Too bad,” he says.

“Ah,” I say. “It doesn't matter.”

What kind of talk is this?
Where are Danny and I, fishing off the creek bridge, dreaming about the NHL, planning how we'd get into Lucy Dombrowski's pants, saying everything and anything that popped into our minds. There was no patrolling what you said then. I think something new, but cannot say it
. Danny, you should see Kristiina. You'd love her. Personally, I'm just as glad Batcha's dead. Isn't my old man looking old? Do you ever look at yourself, Danny, and say “Holy old baldheaded, where did I go?” Do you, eh?

“Poppa says you're doing good at the mill,” I say as Danny lights up.

He gives his answer in skywriting, the exaggerated nodding and absent-minded look at the ceiling sending the smoke arrogantly up.

“I'm doing okay,” he says.

“Good,” I say.

Danny smiles the old smile. He thins before my eyes, hair growing and curling once again around my head. “You've made a bit of the news, eh, lad?”

“You've seen?”

“Sure. Everybody got the picture of you spitting. I
loved
it.”

“Poppa's not so pleased,” I say, nodding to the old man in the far corner.

“Fuck, everybody thinks it's a hoot. That's me old buddy, eh?”

I smile, feeling my own years shed. Soon we are standing there bouncing on the balls of our feet, laughing quietly at nothing in particular, just the warmth of our longstanding.

“You've had some troubles, lad,” Danny says.

“Yah, that son-of-a-bitch of an agent” — did I just say
dat?
— “I'd kill him if I ever saw him, you know.”

“And I'd be right there to help you.”

Soon I can see the conversation will not be able to help itself. When Danny finally asks, as I know he must, I sense he feels as awkward as I.

“You figure you're through playing?”

I surprise myself with the answer. “Probably.”

But Danny surprises me even more with what he says. “We're not kids anymore, are we?”

We? Kids?
I stare at Danny, but he does not see me, his pig eyes sealed with delight.
Why would he say that?
I have not mentioned how fat he has gotten. I have not asked him where his hair went. I have not said that Lucy, compared to Kristiina, looks like a black bear in that stupid dress. He cuts me with banter and I build him up by saying nothing.

I let it go. I know why Danny must say these things. He knows that I know there is nothing inside that fat. He knows that I know the truth about his hockey dreams and he is damned if I will live mine out without him pissing in the bed.

Eventually Danny drifts to where the old men are lying about their pathetic lives. Fish are recaught, timber refelled, weights relifted, but no matter how many times they redo it, they cannot get it right because it will always be them telling the lie, not the man they imagined holding the rod, the axe, the canthook.

Father Schula conducts the funeral, the same stringy voice that used to tell me to keep my head up now asking me to keep it down for something I can't quite buy. I hold Poppa's good elbow and he weeps into a hanky, pretending it is a cough. I do not once think of Batcha, only of myself and Danny standing while he blows smoke and tells me my whole life — a life that makes his look like a mayfly's in comparison — has been nothing other than an exercise in growing up.

We're not kids anymore, are we?

Who does he think he is?
Where's your heart, Danny? Take a look at your own rep: fat boy, baldy, loser ...
I'm too kind, too kind. If Batterinski had the same instincts in real life that he has in hockey, it would be Danny in that box they're carting out to the cars now. Thank God I am also human, too human.

Father Schula cannot help but smile as we squirt through the muck up toward St. Martin's cemetery. He would just as soon forget all the formalities and show us all how the parish's proud new purchase has eliminated the need for a vault for all but the deepest winter months. From first thaw on he has a second-hand John Deere to do in an hour the workload Tomasz Kukurski used to take three days with a spade and pine shoring to complete, and Kukurski could only dig from May through October. The John Deere is still warm, melting ice periodically dripping down onto the manifold and steaming quietly into the air. Beyond John Deere, Batcha's grave has been dug, a high mound of oily, black muck standing vigil by the near fence.

We bury Batcha for good by returning to the church for coffee, tea,
mazureks
and
placeks
and uncrusted breads the women's auxiliary are putting out in the basement. But first Poppa and Jan take me back to the church proper, where they genuflect and pray to the Black Madonna while I stare at my hands and wonder if they will ever again sing with the rush of blood. Danny's sly crack is still bothering me.

I light one of the candles on the gospel side of the altar and slip two quarters into the small slot underneath a Scotch-taped sign asking for two dollars. Poppa sees me lighting the candle and nods in solemn approval. He does not know it is not for Batcha. It is for me.

On the way out, I walk slowly around the church, past the oak confessional with the drapes of dried blood, past the plaster angels standing on the skull, the screaming residents of hell below, down all the way to the rear of the room where there is nothing but the baptismal font and the smiling, confident faces of the four dead soldiers.

I still do not feel as old as any of them, even the nineteen-year-olds. Perhaps, though I now feel like them at the moment they realized the Lancaster was headed into the black pull of the gulf. Did they, too, sense that this was all a crazy mistake going on here and somehow they'd become trapped in it? Did they scream that it wasn't time yet? Did they expect to pull out of the dive? Did, they too, believe the best was supposed to lie ahead?

The cheat was on for them, just as it's now on for me.

When the telephone rings in the morning I do not know where I am. I recognize the rings before I recognize my own room, and before I can place myself I am downstairs in my underwear, the air strange about me and the linoleum ice-cold on my bare feet. It might be Kristiina.

I shout, expecting Finland. “Hello!”

The voice is close, surprised by my velocity. “Felix? Is that you?”

I tone down. “Yah.”

“Matt Kenning here, Felix. From
Canada Magazine.”

“Oh yah, how are you? That story out yet?”

“That story isn't finished yet, I'm afraid. What's this crap coming out of Finland all about?”

“What crap?” I ask, but I know.

“You haven't seen the
Globe?
” Fool, he asks as if there's a box at the subway stop in front of the house. The only time people in Pomerania see the
Globe
is if they order china dishes from the catalogue.

“We don't get it here.”

“You're on the front page. Erkki Sundstrom has accused you of illegal pay-offs. It's a wire service story — Reuters — not much detail, but it says Tapiola has an illegal penalty pay-off system worked out with the players. True?”

“Not quite, no.”

“The Finnish Ice Hockey Federation has voted to suspend Tapiola's operations. They might be expelled from the league.”

“For that?”

“They're really worked up about it, Felix. You're a
cause célèbre
over there. I tried to call you and finally got Pekka and he said you were back home here. Sorry to hear about your grandmother.”

“Yah.”

“Pekka, by the way, thinks the pay-off thing's all a big joke.”

“He would.”

“He asked me to tell you that Kristiina's gone back to the hospital but you're not to worry. He says he'll call you himself. But he said it's nothing serious, that she'll be out soon.”

I can feel the sweat forming on my forehead, the phone slipping in my hands, my heart changing gears. “Tell me
exactly
what he said about her.”

“Just that. He said it was routine and you had no worries, but he wanted you to know, okay?”

“I'll call him.”

“Look, I'll call back for you, okay? Save you the money.”

“No.”
Who does this guy think he is?

“Okay, but look — I've got to talk to you more, okay? We can't have this story come out without clearing up these accusations, can we?”

“Can't we just forget the story?”

“Can't. The colour's already locked in. We got nothing from the Leningrad shoot, of course, but research dug up some first-rate stuff from Helsinki. And of course there's the NHL stuff.”

“You can't hold back on the story?” I ask.

“Uh-uh. Look, the timing is to your advantage. Fight fire with fire, I say. I can't move the editor on this, so we got two choices. One, we can either go with what we got, with an italicized news update at the end — but with nothing from you. Or we can do it right, rework it all to deal with this whole kerfuffle in mind, with your own say in the matter.”

He has me and knows it. Suddenly I need him more than he needs me. If only I'd said no in the first place I could just hang up now and forget it. But that is the press: give them enough rope and they'll hang you.

“Okay,” I say with a long push of air. “Shoot.”

“Over the phone?” He seems surprised.

“You're on a deadline aren't you?”

“The editor's stretched it another week. He wants me to drive up and see you personally.”

“Why? You know what I look like.”

Keening sputters. “But it would be so much better, Felix. I could capture some of the homey atmosphere, show you as a real genuine person, with feelings. You know. Make your say a hell of a lot more sympathetic. I promise you that, friend.”

“No.”

“No? You mean you don't want me to come up?”

“Not now. Please understand — these are not good times.”

“It would be so much better if I could —”

“You can call me back the day after tomorrow. Okay? I'll be here.”

“Well, okay, but —”

“I got to go now. Talk to you then.”

I hang up without farewell. When I turn to run upstairs for Pekka's number I am blocked by Poppa, standing in his long underwear by the doorway, blocking me. There is fear in his eyes

“Who was that, son?”

“Just a reporter from Toronto. The weekend magazine is doing a feature on me and just wanted some more details.”

“A feature?” But Poppa's delight turns instantly to concern. “What
kind
of feature?”