The Last Season (16 page)

“Had enough?” she asks.

“Just getting used to it,” I say.

“You must not stay in too long.”

“Why?”

The laugh. “You'll die.”

“I believe it,” I say, laughing with her. “Where's the shower?”

Again the laugh. “No shower here.”

“Well, what do we use, then? That bucket?”

She says nothing. She stands, stoops and steps down, taking my hand as she goes. The motion makes her skin shimmer, a calm lake at sunset. It is hypnotic.

She goes out into the hall, pulling me behind her, then surprises me by turning not into the dressing room but to the outside door and opening it. She steps out into sunlight sharp as a knife blade and cold that lunges as the steam did inside.

If only Danny could see me now. I'm standing starkers beside a naked goddess in the middle of a Finland forest in the middle of winter. I blink and focus in on Kristiina. She is standing less than six inches from me, smiling up happily, her big teeth white as the snow, the steam rising in clouds from the top of her perfect head. She has her eyes closed, her mouth open. No one is so dumb that they'd mistake that.

I lean into her, and even Kristiina tastes like birch. I am bewildered, but not fool enough to stop and ask why. I can taste salt and birch and feel her tongue moving, surprising me as it darts high and tickles along the ribs of my roof and then slipping quickly back inside her own mouth. I feel her pressing tightly against me, her breast flattening soft and luxurious against my lower ribs, the flat part of her stomach firm and promising against my groin.

But it is her arms that puzzle me. She seems to be pulling, forcing me down as if we are in a hockey fight and she is trying to knock me off my skates. I place my feet wider and hold fast, my mouth suddenly bubbling over with her wonderful giggle. She breaks away.

“You wanted to cool off,” she says.

She pulls and I follow, falling, pressing together as we hit the snow and the snow gives to form around us. We roll and the snow flattens and she wraps her legs suddenly completely around me and just as quickly I am wearing her and we are pounding together to form a cast of her wonderful bottom in the snow.

I open my eye to see if it is really happening and I see the snow steaming all around us, our lovemaking rising into the winter air and then vanishing.

Our own personal
löyly
.

“It was not just a triumph for the Montreal Canadiens when they defeated the Philadelphia Flyers in four straight games to win the Stanley Cup in 1976, it was a victory for the purists. ‘To sweep them,' Montreal captain Serge Savard said at the time, ‘maybe we put an end to all the crap they stand for.'

No names were required. Schultz was soon gone from the Flyers, and McIlhargey, and Batterinski: new fists for old. The fall would be in the same manner that had led to the rise: the classic Greek interpretation of
hubris
. The fists no longer worked.

Yet Felix Batterinski was not the first tragic figure in this passion play. The first was the strange, bitter man who, in a manner of speaking, constructed Batterinski. His name was Ted Bowles, known as ‘Toilet' to Danny Shannon and other players who despised the man. It was necessary, however, to disguise their feelings, for Ted Bowles was the Vernon midget-level coach. He was a short, ugly man who never recovered from the junior hockey accident that destroyed both his right eye and his career. He returned to Vernon, worked in maintenance at the arena and inherited the thankless job of coaching the local midgets. He coached winning teams, but his tactics were so controversial that eventually he had to be fired.

‘It was a nasty business,' says Desmond Riley, the president of the local hockey association and, ironically, the man who boarded Felix Batterinski when he first arrived in Vernon. ‘Teddy Bowles had old-fashioned ideas and refused to change. He wouldn't work on his Level II or Level III or, for that matter, Level I qualifications. He said pencil pushers had nothing to teach him, and he even turned down our offer to pay for the coaching courses. You can understand our situation — we had to act.'

Since Bowles's dismissal, and subsequent death, Vernon has failed repeatedly to win another midget championship. Riley dismisses this by saying that they were too soft on Bowles's case from the start, that he won not because of what he knew but because of who he had — read Batterinski — and that the Bowles system was so diseased by the time Batterinski left that it has yet to recover.

‘Felix came into my house a shy, good boy,' says Riley. ‘Then Bowles got hold of him and before the year was out this … child … was leading the league in penalties, slipping in his schoolwork and getting caught drinking beer.'

‘I remember our very first practice,' says Tom Powers, the captain of that year's midget team and today the owner of a small local trucking company. ‘We couldn't keep from laughing at this hick and the way he talked — “duh” for “the,” you know — and his underwear — Jesus! his
underwear
! It looked like someone had used it to plug up a radiator'

Batterinski bought new underwear, changed his pronunciation and determined that no one would ever laugh at him again and get away with it. Once Batterinski had moved up to junior with Sudbury, a North Bay player named Simon Billings would make that mistake and pay for it with his hockey future. That fight, Batterinski would say to me nearly twenty years later, had ‘served its purpose.' No explanation needed.

His nickname in Sudbury during those years was ‘Frankenstein.' Again, no explanation needed.”

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

D
anny
told me I'd be beating the Americans to the moon and he was right. I smelled Sudbury twenty miles before I ever saw a building. At first I thought the old lady with the two shopping bags in front of me had let go a squirter; but no, it was the stacks. When I looked out to the left I could see the smoke; the sky which all the way had been as clear as Ig's eyes now looked like some kid had thrown a rotten squash up against it, yellow streaks heading off farther than the eye could see. Along the roadside the bush disappeared, not gradually but instantly, the spruce and rolling hills suddenly giving way to a landscape that could only be described as rusted out. Like Danny said, the moon. The Americans were spending millions to get there; I'd found it for seven dollars and thirty-five cents.

The bus pulled into the Sudbury depot in ninety-degree heat, the air rippling above the downtown rocks. Sudbury looked like a junkyard for other towns, the dump where they unloaded everything that didn't fit or had broken down or was too old to be of any use anymore. I figured my hockey career was over before it had even begun. The only scouts this hole had ever seen would have been looking for Indians, or the way out.

“You Batterinski?”

I turned, shocked anyone would come to meet me. Surely not a player — how could they dare let one near the bus terminal without losing him to a one-way ticket home? But this was obviously an athlete: young enough, big enough, cocky enough. He had on a Sudbury Hardrocks T-shirt, jeans, and a pair of laceless sneakers that looked like they'd just been burped out of the smelter. He had Danny Shannon's practised smile, a bent nose and hair like a devil's paintbrush. He was to become — forever, I once thought — my best friend on earth.

“Yah,” I said.

He stuck out his hand. I took it, slowly.

“I'm Al Bender,” he said. “‘Torchy.' Coach sent me down to welcome you.”

“Yah.”

I couldn't dampen him. He swooped up my duffle bag, then took my suitcase and started off, leaving me nothing to carry but the
Cracked
magazine I'd picked up in North Bay. I had to hurry to catch up.

He talked over his shoulder like I was in a cart he was pulling. “You'll love it here. Never mind how it looks. You ever been here before?”

“No.”

“Most people hate it at first. It's like they died and went to hell. But then they love it.”

“Where you from?” I asked.

“Kirkland Lake.”

“Is that right?”

“Yah. I know Dick Duff a bit.”

“Christ,” I said impressed.

“Shit, everybody knows old Duffy. Where're you from?”

“Vernon.”

“Oh yeah. Lotsa cottages, eh?”

“You got it.”

“What's your old man do?” Torchy asked.

“My father owns a hardware store. A chain, actually.”

“Geez, great.”

“What does your father do?”

“My old man?” Torchy shouted back at me, still hauling ahead.

“He's a fucking drunk.”

Torchy Bender. Torchy. Funny, but when I think of him now I always see him as he was then, not as he became in L.A. Torchy played centre for the Hardrocks, nifty with a head fake that made him look like his body had somehow separated at the waist, like a child's Slinky toy. Torchy could come over the blueline, deliver the head fake, tuck the puck between the defenceman's legs, leap four feet straight up and over the hip check and land in full flight, completely clear. In regular-season play over 1963–1964, he had fifty-seven goals and sixty-one assists for a hundred and eighteen points and precisely two minutes in penalties. I had seven goals, forty assists, for forty-seven points and a hundred and thirty-seven minutes in penalties. We both made second-team all-star. The perfect pair: him the dream, me the nightmare.

The second year we even lived together, free of charge, in the basement apartment of the team owner, Gus Demers. It was a magnificent setup, a large red-brick home out Ramsay Lake Road, dynamited straight into the rock so our bedrooms were suspended out over the water. We had our own entrance and our own refrigerator, always fully stocked. Gus gave us full access to the inboard-outboard cruiser, the sailboat and the white Valiant convertible; Torchy assumed access to the owner's daughter, Lucille.

I'm not even sure Gus minded. As long as it helped the team, anything was all right by him. Torchy would be pumping her down in the boathouse long after swimming weather and fifty feet away Gus would sit in the family room with the television blasting and his big, beefy hand wrapped around a fourth double rye and Coke and he'd turn to me — me always drinking milk straight from the carton because I was convinced Coke would turn my face into its own Sudbury — and he'd squish up his fat eyes and say something like, “Dirty fucking Jesus Christ, Bats — aren't them two ever coming in?”

Maybe Gus liked the idea. Maybe Torchy pumping Lucille, like Gus's exaggerated swearing, somehow made him feel more like one of the boys. Torchy was always saying how Gus didn't want to be the owner, he wanted to be stickboy. He didn't look down on us; he looked up, like we were something he'd never been able to be. I'm sure he'd always been too fat to play the game. Even at supper the sweat would be rolling down through his greasy hair just from the scramble for the third pork chop. He competed with his mouth, always cursing, promising, praising, backstabbing, lying. Harmless, though. And kind. And simple. Lucille's virginity probably had as much value to him as an empty refrigerator. Gus Demers's theory was the same for screwing, eating and hockey: if you see an opening, fill it up.

Lucille. She was seventeen years old, a brilliant student who applied her ample brains to far more than isosceles triangles. She beat Ed Sullivan to the Beatles and San Francisco to free love. A genius who never guessed wrong. Torchy used to say she was fine once you kept a paper bag over her body, which was a bit nasty because Lucille did have a marvellous face, and fine, long brown hair sheltering fawn eyes. Her flaw was no tits, that's all, and maybe a few extra pounds on her hips. Torchy was convinced he'd failed somehow, having gotten into her pants almost immediately, but under brassiere never. “It's like a goddamn Band-aid,” he'd say. “I bet if she took it off her little titties would flake off.”

I never found out. She kept her brassiere on for me too.

For months it had been my impression that Lucille was Torchy's girl, though Torchy clearly felt no commitment beyond the boathouse, the back seat of the Valiant, the television room, the ping-pong table, and once, he claimed, the breakfast nook, where the cornflakes stuck to Lucille's ass. Lucille was like a magazine Torchy kept hidden under the mattress. He reached for her when he needed it, dropped her the second he was finished. And, again like a copy of
Gent
, she took it all, lying low and never changing expression from one session to the next. I wondered what it was she got out of it all. It never occurred to me that perhaps she just liked it.

One Sunday night shortly after nine I was lying on the couch eating a sardine sandwich and half-watching
Bonanza.
I'm convinced it was the episode where Hoss meets the leprechauns, or maybe I'm just remembering magic and nothing else; whatever, that night it finally happened to me. Lucile's parents were out to dinner at the in-laws and Torchy was on the milk run back from Kirkland Lake, where he'd gone for his mother's birthday. No one home but the two of us.

Lucille came downstairs, wearing her housecoat and carrying a huge ice cream float.

“Any good?” she asked.

“Oh, not bad. Hoss has fallen in with these little Irish leprechauns.”

“Sounds great,” she said, with her marvellous snottiness. She fell into the chair opposite, flat on her back, he head barely tilted up by a pillow so she could get at her straw. She made a loud, sucking sound, not even at the bottom of the glass yet.

“I'm bored,” she said. “Aren't you?”

I turned to answer her, but couldn't.
She'd forgotten to put her panties on!
She sat, legs wide apart, house coat riding like a canopy over the entrance. I couldn't possibly tell her. I turned back to
Bonanza
, aware of the blood rising within, in two places.

She slurped again, louder.

“You like that show better than this one?” she asked.

I couldn't turn. I couldn't answer. I turned the other direction and slapped the pillow straight and shifted.

A slurp. “I thought,” she said, laughter teasing in her voice, “that you were the league bad boy, eh?”

“I get my share,” I said. I meant penalties, but I know she didn't take it that way. Lucille howled with laughter.

I heard her set her drink down. “Maybe you'd like to show me just how bad you are?” she said.

I swallowed and said nothing. Suddenly Hoss vanished and the picture whisteled away in shrinking light. Lucille had kicked off Gus's remote control that he'd rigged up to deal with Lestoil commercials.

“Well?” she said. She had her left leg cocked over the side of the chair, dangling.

“Well,” I said. I didn't know what else to say.

“Well?”

She stood, letting the housecoat drop over her shoulders onto the floor. No panties, but a bra. I stared, remembering Torchy's line that he'd heard of “A” cups but Lucille had the saucers, but I hardly felt like laughing. I coughed and covered my mouth, but she took my hand and pulled it away and fell into my lap and mouth at the same time.

Her tongue tasted of Pepsodent; mine, shocked by hers, must have tasted like sardines — half the sandwich was still sitting on the coffee table, with half a dill — but she hardly seemed to mind. I'd French-kissed before — I wasn't
that
innocent — but up until Lucille I'd been the instigator and I'd believed tongue-touching was simply a wetter, warmer way of holding hands. Lucille tongue-kissed like Hinky Harris stickhandled, fast and with so many deceptive dekes that my own tongue flattened itself to one side in terror.

My only thought was that I didn't know what to do. Fortunately, it didn't matter; Lucille took complete charge, even to unbuckling my pants. She kept on her brassiere; I kept on my socks. In thirty seconds there I was, fitted to her like a plug to a socket while she supplied the current. She pumped; she bucked; she groaned, moaned, grunted, shunted; and never once did her tongue leave my mouth though God knows I could have done with a deep breath. This was harder than starts and stops in practice.

I'd never even thought to put on protection and suddenly I wondered what I should be doing. I wished I'd taken my socks off and then I'd have something to cap it with if I yanked out. But it never came to pass. Lucille's big hips bounced us over to the remote control and onto it and suddenly Pa Cartwright was shouting at us over the dinner table. If he thought Little Joe should hop to it, he never saw us. Before I realized it was Pa shouting and not Gus, I had my pants back on and was reaching, instinctively, for the sardine sandwich. Lucille had also been spooked and was holding her housecoat to her already covered chest — what else do you call it when breasts aren't involved? — and from upstairs came the sound of a door dinging open.

Five minutes later I was working on the pickle, nodding while Gus argued that Chrysler's slant-six engine was going to run General Motors out of business and then we wouldn't have to suffer all this commercial shit at the end of
Bonanza
.

Thank God he didn't ask about the show itself.

I find Torchy Bender difficult to explain. One example seems to cancel the next. On a trip back from the Soo after an exhibition match I saw Torchy's hand sneak off with Dennis Bannerman's leather briefcase — D.S.B. stamped in phony lettering along the handle. Bannerman was my first defence partner, a jerk in Perry Como sweaters who refused to swear and who wrote up biology experiments on the bus while the rest of us were playing hearts. He fell asleep on the late haul down Highway 17, his homework done, his prayers said, and when he opened up his briefcase next morning in Grade 13 physics, he discovered Torchy had convinced the entire first line to take a dump in it.

I saw Torchy cry the day they shot President Kennedy. I saw Torchy pick up a garter snake and snap it like a whip, the guts turning out of its mouth as he tossed the reptile in a high, twisting circle toward a group of terrified public school girls.

I saw Torchy pick up a small girl who'd lost her mother at what passed for the Sudbury Plaza. He settled her down, dried her tears and then walked around carrying the child and shouting the mother's name like a bullhorn until he found her leafing through romance magazines in Steinberg's.

I saw Torchy steal Gus Demers's .22-calibre semi-automatic Cooey and sneak over to the Ramsay Lake Golf and Country Club, hid in the cedars just off the 250-yard mark on the eleventh hole and use a mushroom long rifle to blow up a Titleist another twenty yards to the left. When the foursome that was playing the eleventh hit the fairway in terror, Torchy coolly sprayed six shots over their heads, running for it only when the clip ran out.

I saw Torchy impersonate poor Alvin Dorsett's stutter until Dorsett broke down and quit the team and then I saw Torchy turn around and talk him into coming back out and threaten to drop the first person that made a joke about his friend Alvin.

I saw Torchy phone his mother in Kirkland Lake every Sunday night at ten, the voice rising from his throat so childish and removed from the brute who held the receiver that it looked, at first sight, like a telephone joke, Torchy phoning some poor old woman and pretending he was something he was not. In a way he was; in another way, not.

I saw Torchy Bender quietly pick up first Snap an then Clearasil at a time when it was beginning to look as if my pimples were growing me rather than me them. It had gotten to the point where I was afraid to shake hands for fear pus would explode out of my nose. Torchy bullied me to wash carefully every night — not with Dr. Jarry's pumice stone, which he threw out when I wasn't looking — and then go to sleep with a brown mask of Clearasil, which I would scrub off in the morning. For a week I looked like a trampled strawberry patch, but then, mysteriously, the season of Batterinski's pimples ended.