The Last Season

by Roy MacGregor

  The choir and sidesmen went to work. The Dombrowski pew spilled out its contents and suddenly I was caught up in Lucy’s floating twist to the communion altar. She had on a new dress, cotton, floral pink, a sheer purple scarf around her neck, a skull-fitting red hat and big winter boots. Not dressed as well as some of the Vernon girls, but as Danny had already said, you throw out the wrapping and keep the present. She looked delicious. I saw her eyes calculate as she stepped up the three stairs to the rail, a quick glance at me — nothing in it — and then a long drink of Danny, followed by a sweetly holy curtsey to the black Madonna. When she knelt and came forward, hands cupping to receive Father Schula’s bread, I could see past the buttons to the white lace of her brassiere. I could almost see Danny’s palm print.

  At collection time Danny and I were sent to receive the take from the four sidesmen. Both of us held a huge black-felt-lined golden tray for the men to place their wooden plates on to be returned to the altar for the blessing, while Father Kulas stared to the heavens in silent thanksgiving. When we bowed I detected Danny’s left hand move ever so slightly, almost imperceptibly, but not so little that I did not see the ten-dollar bill being crumpled into his fist. When Father Kulas took the trays and we returned to our positions, Danny reached inside his cassock for a hanky and safely deposited the money, replacing the hanky, after a flamboyant but definitely dry blow, into the other pocket.

  “How could you?” I asked later in the basement.

  “How could I resist?” he said, laughing.

  “It’s stealing from the church,” I said, furious with him.

  “Ah, bullshit it is. How’s the Pope going to miss a tenner?”

  “You won’t say that if you end up in hell,” I said very righteously.

  “I’ll tell you where Danny Shannon’s going. Straight to heaven.” He kissed the bill. “This here’ll take me to the Renfrew show with sweet little Lucy.”

  The bill kissed for luck, he then stuffed it into his jacket pocket and kept it rammed there as we pushed through the choir stragglers, up the stairs and through the priest’ line. Danny went first, and both Father Kulas and Father Schula seemed to awaken visibly when they saw who was next in line. The procession stalled completely, leaving the sidesmen, linen women and entire choir to wait and simply gawk as Danny yakked on about hockey in Vernon and lied about school and built up his chances in the big time. You’d have thought he was the Bethlehem Star himself, not a third-stringer; yet when it came to me I was welcomed, patted, shaken and yanked quickly through and out into the cold punch of the parking lot and the careful-not-to-swear shouts of men looking for booster cables. Uncle Jan had the Chevrolet waiting, purring with heat. Poppa was razzing him for letting it idle for two hours, saying it had cost him a quarter of a tank of gas, but Ig was cheering for the radio and Sophia, Jozefa and Batcha all seemed asleep.

  I got stuffed in back with the women, with no one to talk to all the way back. It was a half moon and too cold for cloud. I remember how the birch stand on this side of the creek ran over the window so it made me imagine a zebra, and almost instantly I thought of bear, the shadows making me damned glad I wasn’t taking this road on my feet, alone, as I had previous Christmases.

  How, I wondered, could Danny have shaken hands with the priests using the very hand that had stolen from the church? Part of me felt they should have known, that they should have at least treated me with a little more of the respect I had always been careful to return. But for whatever reason they never seemed to feel comfortable around me, or me too much around them. Unlike Danny. His right hand had moved from Lucy Dombrowski’s boob to the communion chalice to a dip in the collection plate to the priests’ congratulations—and he probably hadn’t washed it once in all that time. Me, I believed. I prayed. I was a good Catholic even if I sometimes slept in to give me strength for a Sunday game. And I always meant to do right, to respect the church and to get to heaven, where the only flaw in the paradise I envisioned was that it couldn’t possibly have room for a Danny Shannon.

  But there was always this thing between me and the church. Almost as if I might have something that threatened them, hiding in the same pocket Danny had stuffed his tenner into. But what, I didn’t know.

  My fist? Why would that bother anyone unless I made it do so?

  Batcha?

  “Well?” I said when Danny and I met to catch the Pembroke bus for the run back to Vernon the following Thursday.

  “Well what?”

  “How did it go with Lucy?”

  “Okay, I guess.”

  “You guess?” I said, bewildered. “Did you or didn’t you?”

  “I did,” Danny said slowly, then smiling. “But she didn’t.”

  “Oh, come on. How is that possible?”

  Danny kicked the snow and continued to laugh. “Anything is possible in the back seat of a ’59 Dodge.”

  I could see the bus cresting the hill at St. Mark’s and panicked.

  “Come on. What do you mean?”

  Danny turned sheepish, blushing. “She saw my bandage before I could get it off, eh?” he said very low, kicking violently at the snow.

  “She wouldn’t believe it was just an injury. She figured I had V.D.”

  The driver eventually came back and said we couldn’t sit together any longer unless I stopped laughing.

  Six weeks back in Vernon and Danny proved good as his word on another matter. He quit school immediately on his sixteenth birthday, just as he’d promised, and his hockey began to go downhill as quickly as Main Street. At first I blamed it on his pool playing, but soon enough I realized the one thing he was truly practising was stealing.

  Danny’s favourite hit spot was the tiny smoke shop, Denton’s, and some days it seemed he carried most of the store’s stock in the inside of his hockey jacket. Denton’s was run by a woman in a wheelchair and her half-blind mother. It never occurred to Danny that he was taking unfair advantage or that it might be something to be ashamed of. He’d march up to the tobacco sign guarding the glass door and knee the Macdonald’s lassie right in the face, entering without even taking his hands from his pockets.

  His specialty was the magazine rack, pretending to be deciding between Hockey Pictorial and Mad while really stuffing the inside of his coat with Sir and Gent and Men Only and Sun Worshipper. I was, admittedly, caught both ways, bothered by his gall and stealing but desperate to get my own fluttering paws on one of those magazines. He gave me a Sun Worshipper and I took it—receiving stolen goods, I know—and it was absolutely the last time I ever bothered with the pins in the damned National Geographic. Not that Sun Worshipper was the greatest magazine; it had too many old people, too many fat people, too many young kids and—worst of all—not a single person with nipple or pubic hair, thanks to some fuzzy, erased area you had to fill in with your imagination. But at least they weren’t wearing bones through the nose.

  I came out of school one cold Monday toward the end of the month and Sugar was waiting at the corner, the exhaust from his old yellow Studebaker practically making him invisible. He had to call out before I realized who it was.

  “You want a ride home, Batterinski?” he asked.

  “No sweat, Sugar. It’s just up the hill.”

  “Get in,” he growled.

  I did. But first he had to get out. The passenger door wouldn’t stay shut and so he’d fastened it by an inner tube running from the door handle to the steering column. I had to slide across and hoist my legs over the rubber tube and sit more like I was in a bathtub than a car. Sugar slammed his door twice and then proceeded to drive off in the opposite direction from Riley’s. I said nothing. We went out the snow-covered road toward the river locks, toward where I knew Sugar lived, the shockless car waving over the road like a speedboat.

  “What the hell is wrong with your buddy, Batterinski?” Sugar said, finally.

  I figured Danny had been caught shoplifting and was in custody somewhere.

  “Danny?”

 
“Yes, of course Danny. Who else? You know him best—what’s wrong?”

  “In what way?” I asked, unsure what Sugar was getting at.

  “In all ways! Damn it! He’s got as much God-given talent as Powers you know. But Powers is first-line centre and I’m one game away from benching Shannon. I swear.”

  “Benching him?”

  Sugar nodded. Air sucked defiantly up his nose.

  “He’s had some trouble in school,” I offered.

  Sugar wasn’t biting. “Shit, he already quit school.”

  “Well, he wasn’t very happy with it.”

  Sugar pulled the car out of a drift, spinning the wheel like a ship captain as the Studebaker floated down along the river run.

  “Is he homesick?” Sugar asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “What’s his family like?” he asked, tilting his head to focus on me with the black eye.

  “Great.”

  “His dad, does he booze?”

  “Mr. Shannon? Yah, he drinks a bit.”

  “Heavy?”

  “Well, I wouldn’t like to say, but sometimes yes.”

  Sugar dipped in and circled in the locks parking lot, rising back onto the road and into the blindness of his own exhaust.

  “How’s Shannon thought of back there?”

  “He’s popular,” I said. “Just like here.”

  “He was star of the team, though, back there.”

  “Yah. When we played bantam he was.”

  “In your opinion, Batterinski,” Sugar said, “did he play better back there than here?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m thinking of sending him back there,” Sugar said.

  For a while we drove in silence, but I had to know. “When?”

  “At the end of the season,” Sugar said. I breathed with relief.

  “No use humiliating him. You don’t mention this, I won’t. Understood?”

  “Understood,” I said.

  Beyond the cemetery he pulled off and down the road leading toward the Rock Hill and the summer lookout. Then he turned down across the swamp road and up toward the arena, still not going anywhere near the direction of my ride home.

  “How about you, Batterinski, you like it here?”

  “Sure,” I said.

  “Homesick?”

  I shook my head. “Not a bit.”

  Sugar smiled at this. “Good. Good. Tell me, how do you think you’re doing?”

  “Not as good as I’d like to.”

  Sugar nodded in approval. “Good. Good. How do you see yourself as a player?”

  I shifted, uncomfortable with the questions and miserable with the rubber tubing across my legs. They were asleep, singing with blood.

  I cleared my throat and sneaked a look at Sugar. I knew he was waiting. So was I.

  “I don’t know.” I said. “Good puck sense, I guess. Never caught out of position.”

  Sugar grinned. “Never?”

  “Well, not since Parry Sound much, anyway.”

  Sugar stopped the Studebaker outside the arena and leaned his shoulder heavily into his door; it opened with a loud crack. “I’d like to show you something personal, son,” he said.

  I crawled out after him, my legs collapsing and now stinging. Son? Sugar never called anyone anything but their last name. He led me around to the side entrance and pulled his key from the sliding holder clipped to his belt. It hissed out and easily into the lock, turned and then snapped back with a metallic ring. The door opened on my favourite smell: the arena, empty and waiting. Only the night lights on, making the lobby shadowy and cold and the ice beyond dark and rippling red where the distant exit lights bounced along the surface. Sugar reached without looking, tripped a switch and the lobby lights went on. I could see the dried swirls where the mop had gone over the cement floor, could smell the Dustbane. For me, coming into the arena was like crawling back in under the bed covers.

  Sugar walked through the lobby up toward the turnstiles at the entrance, stopping under a long row of old pictures. He tapped the third one from the end.

  “You see this here?”

  I walked over. I saw the usual two rows of players, coach seated between the goaltenders, trophy complemented by crossed sticks out front, a few leeches in business suits and hockey jackets diving in from the sidelines. And old picture, by the haircuts.

  “This here,” Sugar said, continuing to tap the glass with a thick knuckle. “That’s me. Same age as you. See.”

  I looked but could not see Sugar. The man he was tapping was smiling and sharp-eyed, the face thin and full of cockiness, the hair split dead centre and slicked down tight to the skull. He wore the team captain’s “C” and sat to the right of the goalie.

  “The year after this was taken,” Sugar said, “I played at St. Mike’s. Straight into junior ‘A’, you understand. No midget, no junior ‘B’, nothing, straight into the second-best hockey league in the world. You understand?”

  I nodded.

  “Sixteen years old I made second-team all-star. That’s up against Fern Flaman, Doug Harvey, Alan Stanley, a half-dozen others who went on, right?”

  “Yah.”

  “I lost my eye in the all-star game.”

  Sugar turned to face me, almost as if he thought I might not have noticed before. I glanced quickly through him and then back at the picture. It was impossible. They couldn’t even have been distant cousins. I read some of the names underneath. Carrington, C., Wilson, R., Cox, W., LaCroix, J., Bowles, E. (capt.).

  “You think that’s a sad story, I guess,” Sugar said.

  I was getting afraid he was going to start crying.

  “Well…”

  “Bullshit it is!” Sugar shouted. He rapped the picture again, this time the knuckle slamming into the face of a good-looking guy on the back row, left side, “This here’s the real tragedy.”

  I had no idea what to say. I said nothing and soon sensed that Sugar was staring at me, waiting.

  “You know who this is?” he asked.

  “No.”

  “Archie Cargill, that’s who.”

  I had no idea who he meant. It must have shown.

  “You know him,” Sugar said impatiently. “If this was a side view you’d recognize his nose.”

  I looked again. Archie Cargill … Archie — Archie! From the hotel desk. The leech. No way. Impossible.

  “Archie Cargill was the finest prospect ever came out of this one-horse town. Could shoot both ways, just like Howe. Could make the puck dance like he had a string on it. Beautiful skater. Archie went off with me to St. Mike’s and three weeks later I put him on a bus home crying his eyes out.”

  “Why?”

  “Homesick. Scared. Gutless. Same as your pal, Danny. No heart. Archie Cargill had no heart. I’m going to tell you one thing, Batterinski, and I want you to remember it: talent is what begins hockey games, heart is what wins them.”

  I looked at him, not sure whether to cheer or be hurt.

  Sugar smiled. “Don’t worry son. You’ve got talent. You’ve got to have that to start with or there’s no use even talking about it. But Powers has probably got as much talent as you, and maybe even your buddy Shannon has too. But they won’t make it. You will because you want it, you understand.”

  “I guess.”

  Sugar laughed this time, once and loud. “Maybe you won’t ever have the kids dreaming about you, Batterinski, but you sure as shit’ll have the general managers.”

  I had no idea what he meant.

  Not then.

  “Ugga-bugga!”

  Danny could hardly contain himself. “You only got five minutes to get ready!” he shouted over the phone. I pulled it tight to my ear worried the Rileys might hear all the way down in the television room. “Powers got the bottle, just like he said he would. Bucky Cryderman’s got his old man’s car. And I’m supposed to pick Maureen the Queen up later at the Mug Shop.”

  “You’re sure,” I said, uncertain.

&n
bsp; “Ugga-bugga!” Danny shouted and hung up on me.

  They came by for me at seven. Bucky’s old man drove an Edsel, the only one in Vernon, a massive chrome-plated brown and white two-tone that infuriated Bucky when people joked about it. But we did it because Bucky and the car were opposites. Bucky was fat and ugly, with teeth like one of the Jaja’s old stone fences. The car was exquisite: huge, plush seats of real leather, electric everything, more dials than a jewellery store. They had the bottles tucked into the glove compartment, a cherry whiskey and a lemon gin, and Powers made us each hand over two bucks before he’d even show them. Once we’d paid, Bucky drove cautious as a priest’s housekeeper out past the golf course to the gravel pit, where he tucked in behind a fresh bulldozed bank and sat with the heater blasting full. Danny pulled free the cherry whiskey, giggled, skidded the cap off right through the seal by rasping it across the full palm of his hand, pushed down the window button and tossed the cap outside into the snow as if he’d spent his entire Pomeranian youth drinking expensive booze in fancy cars.

  “Hey!” shouted Bucky. “What did you do that for?”

  Danny laughed. “You weren’t planning to save any, were you, Bucky?”

  Bucky looked hurt, worried. ‘Just don’t spill any on the upholstery, eh?”

  Much to my surprise, after Danny took the first swig he handed the bottle back to me. Not Bucky, who owned the car. Not Powers who’d bought the stuff and was team captain. But me, Felix Batterinski. I took it and smelled first. Smelled all right. I tasted: sweet, warm, thick. But the true effect wasn’t until I swallowed. It hit my stomach like flaming gasoline. I gagged, choked — choked just like Christmas Mass, when Batcha was staring at me — and started coughing madly while the others, especially Danny, laughed like it was the greatest show they’d ever seen.

  The next time the bottle came around I drank slowed and neither choked nor coughed. And the next and the next. I began to feel warm, content, a bit proud when Bucky went on about how I’d sucker-punched the big goon from Collingwood on Saturday. It was nice to hear my name mentioned by friends. And me, I was talking more, not just more but better; I even told a joke about why a woman was like a stove — “With both of them ya got a lifter, the leg and poker” — and all of them laughed and Danny never even squealed that I’d picked it up from his old man. It felt good. The car was warm and glowing magically with the dash lights. The bottle came around again and I drained it. I pushed the window button, listened as it hummed down and then hurtled the bottle by the neck straight into the bulldozer blade, where it shattered magnificently in the stillness. It was my sound. My night.