The Last Season

by Roy MacGregor

  If he wasn’t my best friend, I’d have killed him. And he knew that, which is why he was even friendlier than usual when I called on him.

  “Your old man’s here?” he asked when I said I was heading down to the hotel to see him. “Jaisus — I’d give anything for my gang to show up for a game.”

  I very nearly said I’d gladly trade him, but let it go, knowing full well Danny’s enthusiasms weren’t necessarily tied to what he really felt. Danny Shannon put popularity before all other considerations and Vernon seemed ready-made for him. He’d only been in town a day when he had his first telephone call. A girl, naturally, and since then hardly a day went by without a call, a single female screech “You’re cute!” and then a banged receiver. Cute, yes, I couldn’t deny that, Danny with his curly hair black as a puck and those big sleepy brown eyes and what Poppa always calls “the damn sneaky Irish charm.” But I never begrudged him that. It was all he had, really. He wasn’t a first-stringer on the team, not like me, and he sure as hell wasn’t going to make any go of school. His personality was as crucial to him as my hips were to me. What people knew you by.

  Vernon had a great Main Street, snaking up from the river past the hotel and the theatre and on up into the hill where the water reservoir sat. The river ran between two lakes, the one back of the arena called “Fairy,” and Danny found it impossible to walk by the sign over top of Riley’s Hardware without splitting a gut. All it said was ODDFELLOWS CLUB, FAIRY BRANCH, which was good for one laugh but hardly what Danny had turned it into. I knew I’d have to make sure we kept to the other side of the street if we took Poppa anywhere, God forbidding.

  The only similarity between Pomerania and Vernon was the amount of walking you had to do. Vernon had a covered arena with artificial ice; Pomerania had an outdoor rink, ice pebbles and spring muck. Vernon had four thousand people; Pomerania had maybe two hundred — and most of them hidden in the pines. Once we had eleven hundred spectators out for a game in Vernon; in Pomerania once, maybe, we had eleven.

  But the walking — that was entirely the same. You either climbed leaning into your direction or fell away backwards to compensate for the long steps down. The coach, Teddy Bowles — a hell of nice guy nicknamed “Sugar” by the town, “Toilet” by a couple of players, Danny Shannon included—he said it was our great fortune to live in a place like Vernon. “You’ll build legs here that’ll last you the rest of your life.” Danny said he’d rather have a car that would last him the rest of his life, but he didn’t have a car, so we walked. We walked up and down Main Street, the two of us always in our Pomeranian bantam jackets, yellow with black arms, me with “Asst. Captain” stitched in below my number, 7, the same number Tim Horton wore for the Leafs.

  But I’d have given up the number just to walk like Danny. With his fists jabbed into his jacket pockets he seemed to leisurely tip forward and kind of flow into his walk, casually breaking a sure fall with the toes of his feet. Me, I was gangly, and where Danny’s cords draped perfectly over top of his desert boots, my jeans were too short and showed a big gap of white sock between cuff and sneakers. I gawked around when I walked like I’d never been there before, whereas Danny would glide along with his head held straight on as if he was watching television and the town was simply slipping off the screen and folding around him as he passed. He became the centre, no matter where he was. And me, I always felt at the edge, circling like a seagull until my own chance came along.

  I stood a moment at the hotel desk, waiting, but the man in charge sat reading a war comic, ignoring my stare. I had to clear my throat to get him to look up, revealing a nose even larger than Poppa’s. Beneath it he was smiling.

  “Hi there, son. Your dad’s in room 404.”

  I stared, blinking.

  “You wonder how I know, is that it? I know you. And I know your buddy there. How ya doing, Danny?”

  Danny smiled back. “Good, Arch. How’s she going?”

  “Good. Room 404, boys.” The nose tipped down, the eyes settling back on the comic book.

  Danny was up ahead, already on the stairs. “How do you know that guy?” I asked.

  “Shit. Don’t you notice nothing? He’s always at the rink, hanging around. Powers bets he’s a fruit, so you got to watch him, eh?”

  I nodded, marvelling at Danny’s knowledge of the town after two months. We ran to the fourth floor of the Muskoka, where the toilet sign on one of the doors announced that this was where the cheap rooms were.

  “Hey, Danny!” Poppa shouted when he yanked open the door. “How’s the boy?”

  “Good, good, Mr. Batterinski,” Danny said, reaching for Poppa’s hand. “Great to see you.”

  They seemed more pleased with being together than Poppa and I had earlier. “I bought some chocolate bars for you boys,” Poppa said, grabbing them off his bed. “Here.”

  Danny took his eagerly. I shook my head, no.

  “Hey, that’s not my son.”

  Dats. Jesus.

  “He’s afraid of getting zits,” Danny said, and laughed.

  “Zits?” Poppa asked.

  “Pimples,” Danny explained and they both laughed. I could feel it rising inside me, the urge to burst and the relief that would follow.

  I could taste Poppa in the room. It was like he’d brought all the smells of home with him. One whiff was all anybody needed to know right off how poor we were, and that Poppa worked with a chainsaw. I looked at Poppa and realized how lucky I’d been he had his shirt buttoned up tight when he showed up at Riley’s; open now, I could see his longjohns, the pink ones, the ones he says are flesh-coloured but which look more like a dirty bandage than anything made of human skin. But then Poppa didn’t look like he had human skin, either. If you saw him naked you’d swear he’d been hand-painted, with a big “V” of dark red from the wind and sun spreading down his neck, up his throat and over his face as high as his cap mark, and then again on his forearms from the elbow down. Everywhere else the skin he never exposed was pure white, the line as clear as the difference between skin and pulp when you bite into a ripe apple.

  “You have anything to eat?” Danny asked Poppa.

  Any-ting. Christ, Danny was talking like he was home for the holidays.

  “Had a sandwich,” Poppa said. “What do you boys want to do? Treat’s on me.”

  Fearing Danny might mention the hockey game, bright lights and Vernon people, I acted. “What about the movie?”

  “What’s on?” Poppa asked, excited.

  “Judgment at Nuremberg,” Danny said with evident disinterest. “Supposed to be a drag.”

  “Naw,” I said. “It’s about the war.”

  “The war?” Poppa said. “Geez, I’d like that.”

  Finally, we flipped a coin. The Virgin Mary must have been standing on top of the Muskoka Hotel because I was blessed with victory. But I won only time. The movie was, as Danny said, a drag; all the right people — Lancaster, Tracy, Widmark — and lots of stuff about war crimes and what the Nazis had done, but too much talk and not enough action. Poppa was sitting between Danny and me and kept excusing himself to go to the snack bar and the can. At first I thought he was sneaking off with a mickey, vodka maybe, and I simply couldn’t smell it on him. He kept coughing, too, and once when I looked I realized the cough was being faked. When he took his red hanky up to his face it went to eyes, not his mouth. And he was wiping away tears. Poor Poppa, he saw so few movies — perhaps two before this one — that he hadn’t yet learned that this was all acting and not real at all. Not at all.

  Even in the forty below weather of Pomerania, I always had to be the first one to the rink. And I kept it up in Vernon. Coach Bowles — to me he deserved being nicknamed Sugar — he got so tired of seeing me standing around the side entrance when he arrived to set up that he slipped my own key so I could come and go as I pleased. The day Poppa came to watch I left Riley’s about noon, even though we weren’t playing until seven. I’d told Poppa I’d see him after the game, that I needed the ti
me before to unwind and get ready, and he seemed to understand. And I took the same crazy route to the arena I’ve followed since we won our opening game of the season against Orillia, shortcutting across the curling rink parking lot, hopping the chainlink fence around the war memorial — wreaths just now starting to wilt after a week in the cold and rain—then over across the field back of the Legion Hall, through the lane between the houses, down the slope by the river and up again to the rink. Someone down toward the docks was burning wet leaves and the smoke was rolling along the river, sharp and delicious. For some reason it made my stomach growl.

  Sugar was already there, sharpening in the skate room. I could hear the store and smell the dry grind, and though I loved to watch him work, I passed and went directly to the dressing room. The lights were on over the ice and I could hear Bull Tate tripping the tank levers as he began his first flood. Usually I loved to watch that too, the water spreading wet and glimmering behind him, the steam rising from the spread rag and the taps, but this I passed on too.

  It was not a matter of trying to be first. I had to be first. And far worse in Vernon than back home. At our very first skate in Vernon we all dressed together, and Tom Powers, who had already been made team captain by Sugar, stopped right in front of me, pointed straight at my drawers and shouted: “Christ, if you’re going out there in that, forget the equipment — no one’s going to come near you!”

  No one had ever said anything like that in Pomerania. I’d been expecting to be called “Polack,” had even specially remembered the great line Jaja’s hero, Wally Stanowski, had when he played for the Leafs, so I could use it, too: “I train on Polish sausage, the breakfast of champions.” But they weren’t laughing at my heritage — it was my underwear! I couldn’t just jump up and paste Powers, so I leaned over and pretended I’d lost something in my duffle bag, scrounging around till I felt some of the burn leave my face. So I didn’t have nice, new, bright white insulated underwear — big goddamn deal! I was angry and I couldn’t shake it. I carefully checked out Powers during the warm-up, the way he’d skate in over the blueline and then let the puck drop back from the blade to his skate, kick off over onto the other skate and then kick the puck back up to the blade, the illusion being that he had lost it. I skated around memorizing his move and gathering myself, enjoying the season’s first waft of arena air on my face, giving my little extra kick as I rounded the net so I came out of the turn with pants hissing and the ice behind me making a sound like I’d just been withdrawn from a scabbard. And then, when scrimmage began, I simply waited for Powers to try that little suck move on my side, aiming for his head rather than the puck, and I put him up so high he did a complete somersault in the air and came down so hard on his brand-new Tackaberry skates that the left blade bent and Sugar, smiling rather than angry, had to go off with him into the skate room and pound it straight with a mallet.

  After that I never had a moment’s trouble from Tom Powers. After that, though, I never failed to be the first one dressed either. Not that I had to any more. At the very next practice I arrived to find a brand-new cellophane-wrapped set of Stanfield longjohns resting on my seat. The only other person in the rink was Sugar Bowles, sharpening, but he never said a word about the underwear, and I never mentioned it either. But it had to be him.

  I could hear Sugar coming along dragging a new bundle of sticks and I got up and caught the door for him. I’d been imagining I was Tim Horton sitting there yakking up a storm with Stanley and Bower before we took to the ice. But it was hard to think of Sugar as Punch Imlach. Sugar had more hair sticking out one ear than Punch had on his entire head. Sugar’s face was all squashed up like a bulldog and his hair began, I swear, about an inch above his eyebrows, hair like Poppa’s, black and thick and dry-looking like he’d just washed it, though I doubt Poppa and he had had a half-dozen washes between them over their lifetimes. Punch looked like a bank teller; Sugar like the holdup man. Sugar had this huge scar on his face running from the corner of his right eye down across the cheek and sliding off his jawbone. The right eye seemed to look at you but was cloudy, the left one nearly as black as his hair. Tom Powers put it about that Sugar had lost his eye in a hockey fight, kicked by a skate when he was down, but Sugar hadn’t verified this story. Powers also said that Sugar was once a prospect himself, but when Danny pressed him on the way back from a North Bay game, Sugar denied he’d even played the game and told us all to shut up and try and get some sleep.

  “Batterinski.”

  “Yah,” I said, looking up. The cloudy eye seemed to have me fixed. Sugar was still taping, but not thinking about it.

  “What do you think of Fontinato?”

  “He’s okay.”

  “You ever hear of Sprague Cleghorn?”

  It sounded like a disease to me. “No. Why?”

  “Cleghorn’d eat Fontinato for breakfast.”

  “He played?”

  Sugar nodded and spit. “Five times they arrested him for hurting players. Five times.”

  I shook my head. I didn’t know what else to do.

  “Newsy Lalonde,” he said, letting it hang.

  I looked at Sugar, unsure.

  “Sent more’n fifty guys off the ice on stretchers.”

  Sugar finished taping the first stick, bit off the tape and picked up another, his head turning so the left eye could catch me directly.

  “Who do you like in the NHL, Batterinski?”

  “Horton,” I said.

  “You take a look at Fontinato,” he said. “And maybe even this new guy Eddie Shack. You understand?”

  I didn’t. Sometimes no one could figure out Sugar or his crazy riddles. Talking with him was always like breaking an oar halfway across the lake. But I did like some of his sayings. He really pissed Powers off one practice when he said: “You don’t have enough talent to win on talent alone,” and when Powers came up after practice and asked Sugar if it was meant for him in particular, Sugar just said: “If you have to ask, you must have a question.” Beee-utiful.

  One of the sayings was meant for me in particular, and I knew that for certain because he gave it only to me, all folded over and placed in an envelope with my number on it. “The unforgiveable crime is soft hitting,” it read. “Do not hit at all if it can be avoided, but never hit softly.” Underneath was this name, Teddy Roosevelt, which sounded vaguely familiar to me, but I didn’t have the nerve to ask.

  The other guys straggled in, Terry LeMay, the goaltender, Powers and his sidekick, Bucky Cryderman, then Danny.

  “Hey, Bats,” Cryderman said, laughing, “you want I should call your old man in here to tighten your skates?”

  “Screw off,” I said, closing the issue. Danny was a loudmouth.

  Ten minutes before warm-up Sugar was ready for his talk and slammed a stick into the equipment box for our attention. “All right, then,” he began. “We should be ready. You all remember Parry Sound from the exhibitions, so you forwards know if you get a chance you shoot. Goalie’s weak on long ones to the stick side; but don’t try to suck him because he’s good in tight and flops well. So keep it simple and make your first shots count. I’ll be juggling lines to keep Powers’ line away from their checkers, so if I touch your shoulder that means you are on, not necessarily your line, so just keep track of yourselves, okay?

  “These guys like to carry the puck and they like to make the pretty play, but they don’t seem as keen when the going gets rough. Batterinski?”

  “Yah?”

  “You set the pace, you understand?”

  “Uh huh.”

  “Sprague Cleghorn, remember. Now the rest of you are going to be seeing a very small player out there and though he’s a defenceman they’ll probably play him up front ‘cause he’s only peewee age.”

  “A peewee?” Powers said, falling into giggles.

  “Laugh once and get it out of your system,” Sugar said, eyeing Powers with the black left ball. “His name is Orr and I’ve seen him and he’s already a better player
at twelve than any of you are at fifteen. Understand that? Don’t let his size fool you and watch him. Defence, I want you to stick to him like snot to an over door, understand?”

  All around the room we grunted that we did.

  “Cryderman,” Sugar called, kicking at Bucky’s skates stuck out in front of him like he was about to take a nap. “What’s the toughest fish in the ocean?”

  “Huh?”

  “Come on. You guys think you’re all big fish in a little pond. What is it?”

  “I dunno,” Bucky said. “A shark, I guess.”

  “That’s very good, Cryderman. Now there’s something special about sharks that I want you all to consider. There’s one thing that makes sharks different from all other fish … anyone care to guess what it is?”

  “The fin,” said Powers.

  “Nah.”

  “The teeth,” Danny shouted, showing his.

  “No.”

  Sugar waited, scanning the room, then he smiled. “A barracuda’s teeth are just as nasty, maybe worse. What makes a shark truly unusual is what he doesn’t have. And that’s a swim bladder.”

  Someone laughed. Powers, probably. Or Bucky.

  “Go ahead,” Sugar said. “Laugh. But let me tell you first what it means. A shark has to keep moving constantly. A shark does not float, like other fish. A shark can’t float. He has no swim bladder, see. He can’t let up for a minute and that’s what makes him top dog. You think about that awhile, okay?”

  Sugar walked out the door and closed it silently and no one said a word. No laugh, no burp, no fart. No one would dare destroy Sugar’s pregame silences because they worked. We were leading the league.

  Danny and I could hardly believe it when we first got here. We were used to Father Schula’s prayers that no one got hurt, but so far this year we had had Sugar read aloud from Tom Sawyer, quote John Kennedy and Winston Churchill and some Chinese guy I’d never heard of and give lectures on everything from why water droplets scoot on a hot pan (“Keep the puck away from the traffic”) to how vultures in Egypt break open ostrich eggs by dropping small stones on them (“You can’t do it all yourself”).