The Last Season (21 page)

We each carried two cases of bootleg beer, tripping over the cedar roots as we made our way to the stoop. “We should have got here earlier if we were bringing the booze,” I suggested.

“They got booze. This here's ours.”

Inside they sat on kitchen chairs, chesterfields, a fold-out bed and the floor. Two I didn't know were arm-wrestling on a handmade coffee table. I dropped my beer in the kitchen, already full of cases, a bottle opener hanging on a string from the refrigerator door handle. A transistor radio rode above, sputtering, crackling, fading in and out on the distant Ottawa country station, but no one listened.

“Hey Bats!” Dominic shouted from the floor between the fold out and the far wall. I waved. He wobbled, a bottle of rye between his legs and a six of large Coke beside him, two already empty.

“Congratulations, pro!”

“So long, John Ferguson!”

“Frankenstein lives!”

They were all here. More Danny's friends than they ever were mine, but all were faded memory. No one new had come to Pomerania since the turn of the century, and no one ever had the guts to wonder why. Dominic Topolski now thick and gutted, a distant memory of the tiny crybaby I once played peewee with, Lacha, Tony, other names I couldn't keep straight. They all knew me. Back home, to their families and girls, we were probably best friends. I liked that, people lying about how well they knew you. When I first went to Vernon it had run the other way; this was simply due balance.

Only one of the gathering seemed reluctant to claim me for his own. I knew him instantly: Donovan, the cottager. I could tell by his look of terror. Poor fool. Chinless, glasses like hydro line receptacles, he was clearly yet another of Danny Shannon's chumps paying the price of Danny's acknowledgement.

Our hands filled with drink, the party drove on, and Danny moved effortlessly to centre stage. They even vacated the best chair for him. He talked the loudest, drank the fastest, swore the most. We screwed Maureen the Queen all over again, naturally, and about half a dozen other Vernon girls I'd never heard of. We had Lucy Dombrowski, Patsy Keswicki, Ruth Barkowitz and Agnes Paloski — at least until Danny remembered her brother was there and changed it magnificently into a great practical joke. Had he not been there, Danny would have had poor Agnes grunting and sucking like she breakfasted on Spanish fly. Poor Agnes, who would one day become a nun. Her cross to bear Danny's mouth.

Some of the guys had heard about the Billings fight and wanted me to go over it again, which I did. And then Orr. Danny kept interrupting like he'd been beside me all along, but I didn't care. They listened to me like I was Cassius Clay just returned from whipping Sonny Liston. I could see it so plainly in their eyes. Fear. Respect. Fear and respect. The way they looked at me and the way fresh beer kept flying from the kitchen into my hands made me open up like I never had before. I told them about Lucille, which I swore I'd never mention to anyone, only this time she had tits like Jayne Mansfield. Who knows? Perhaps she had them sprung down like golf-ball elastic behind that formidable bra.

By midnight Danny was having trouble getting a word in edge-wise and I noticed him slipping out the door for a leak. I thought nothing more about it until we heard the explosion.

“What was
that
?” Donovan shouted as he jump to his feet. He screamed
dat
so loud at first I thought he was making a joke of it. It was the first we'd heard from him all night.

We all stood slowly, scared, glancing around. No one knew what to expect: drunken Indians, the provincial cops firing a warning before they walked in with the underage drinking warrants? In a group we headed outside and turned toward the dock, just as another blast rang out over the lake, followed by a loud splash. There was a light on the dock.

“Danny!” I called.

“What?”
There was resentment in his voice, like I had no right. It was a floating dock and I stepped carefully out onto the boardwalk, bothered by the jump of water through the spacing. The others followed, Donovan right behind me.

“What do you think you're doing?” Donovan yelled, near tears.
Tink
— I hadn't taken him for a local. But surely they weren't so stupid they'd moved here voluntarily.

“Fishin'”

“Fishin'?” Palowski shouted from the boardwalk. I could hear him and Lacha laughing.

“Watch this,” Danny said. He leaned over with the flashlight until we could see the twisting back of a fish, a catfish, foolishly rising toward the light. It seemed to float up from the bottom the way a leaf falls in autumn, swaying as it rose. Just as it was about to break water Danny let the shotgun go again. In front of Danny the lake vanished, a hole dug and the fish gone; then the hole reformed, half of the fish shuddering spasmodically from the tail as its entrails rippled and lengthened in the turmoil of the lake.

“You stupid bastard!” Donovan yelled. He was definitely angry. “You'll have the cops here. I said nothing stupid, remember, Shannon.”

“Where'd you get the gun?” I asked.

“I brought it.”

I hadn't seen it in the car. I felt I should help poor Donovan before he broke down completely. “That's enough, eh?” I said to Danny.

“One more shot.”

“No!” Donovan shouted.

“Tomorrow, Danny,” I said.

“Piss off, all-star,” he cursed, yanking the gun away from my reach.

The others were all on the dock. It listed badly, the water washing over our shoes at times. Danny ignored us all. He aimed at the floating Javex bottle where the pump intake went up to the cottage, shot and the bottle vanished in a spray of water.

“Those shots'll carry,” I said, attempting reason.

“Big deal.”

“I'll call the police myself,” Donovan threatened. It was a mistake. Danny always operates precisely the opposite of what one hopes. I reached and caught the barrel of the gun and twisted it partly free. Danny held on. I twisted again, knowing it was hurting his wrists.

“You big prick,” Danny swore.

I thought I might ease the tension with something we could all laugh at. I grasped the first funny thought that came into my head.

“That's what Maureen called me.”

Some of the others laughed immediately, glad for the moment. I felt stupid saying it; I knew I was reaching; but it might work. Danny turned and I thought he was going to let go of the gun. At least he was smiling.

“You know better than that,” he said. “You never even got near her. She wouldn't have anything to do with you, you ugly asshole.”

A simple act. I twisted the gun and booted, catching Danny square in the gut. He folded easily into my shoe, the air leaving him as if just gutted by a fishknife. There was another splash, a hole, and sputtering, Danny rose to fill it. I simply turned and walked off, carrying the gun. No more laughs tonight.

I awoke to a loon call. Not from the lake but the kitchen. Danny came in in his his underwear, grinning ear to ear with a pan full of brown scrambled eggs.

“How's my old buddy this morning?”

“Screw off.”

“You want your eggs right away?”

I sat up and smelled them. Something wasn't quite right.

“They're fried in rye,” Danny offered encouragingly. “Try 'em.”

I shook my head and spun out of bed, thinking for a moment I might lose whatever argument was going on in my stomach. I winced and held it.

“Eat,” Danny ordered. “You'll feel better.”

I did and I did. Danny poured a beer and a half orange juice into a huge glass for me and I got that down too. By the time the rest were up and eating, the party had officially entered its second phase. It seemed the gun and the night before were to be forgotten. Danny was back to his usual charming enthusiasm, planning an afternoon fishing trip on Sabine Creek using his old man's twelve-foot cartop and Lacha's canoe. All we had to do was pick up some more booze and get going.

“Me 'n' Bats'll pick up some two-fours and meet you at his place, okay?”

I turned, mouthing the question, but Danny beat me with the answer.

“We'll need bait.”

I nodded. Lacha would be driving, probably, the half-ton I'd seen when we parked.

“Don't honk when you pull in,” I warned him.

He looked at me like I was crazy. I couldn't explain. Danny was already packing up with not so much as a thank-you to poor Donovan for the use and near-destruction of his parents' cottage. Donovan didn't seem to care. All he wanted was Danny's friendship, and he'd sacrifice anything for it.

All three vehicles raced up past the reservation and the marina and the camps to the flatland drag strip. First one would lead, then the other two would pass, seeing who could come closest to touching. Again, I had shudders about disaster, the career finished before it had even begun, the young star demolished against a thick beech on the far side of the road. When Palowski bore his old Indian out and went past the Fargo with his finger raised, laughing, Lacha threw a beer bottle at him, which whipped across in front of Danny and me in a half-circle, smashing onto the pavement just as we turned into the bootlegger's.

Danny showed no more concern for protecting the booze than he did for his body. We roared toward Batterinski Road as if he thought he could actually catch Lacha, loon-calling out the window and yelling where I could shove my protests. We fishtailed off the pavement onto the gravel and could see the trace of Lacha's wild turn before us, his rear wheels slamming against the footings of the telephone pole. I whistled. Danny laughed, drifting through the turn, down past the rink we once played in, out over the tracks, down along the cattails' flat, up over the bluff and into the turn just before Sabine Creek, Danny slamming the binders so hard that the Chevy turned sideways and stopped barely a door opening from the OPP cruiser sitting idling with the red flashers on.

No one was in the cruiser. As the dust from Danny's spin settled we got out. An officer was walking toward us from up ahead, his hand raised. A second cruiser, also with bubblegums spinning, was blocking the road. He had to cross over deep ruts in the road, snake twists through the hard gravel, where something huge had lost control, bitten into the soft shoulder and sailed over the side into the gully.

I knew without asking that it was Lacha's Fargo.

“There's been an accident, boys,” the officer said “I'll have to ask you to —”

Danny cut him off. “The truck?”

“Yes. You'll have to —”

Danny paid him no attention. He ran to the side, staring over.

“Oh, Lord Jesus Christ!” he shouted before pitching down the bank sideways, breaking his slide, jumping again.

I brushed by the cop and looked myself. I heard another siren coming down the road. Not cops, an ambulance.

Two provincials were down below, one putting blankets around one of Danny's nameless pals who was sitting on a stump shaking and crying. The other pal was standing with Lacha, holding his arm at a funny angle and also crying. Lacha was staring down at the ground, smoking a cigarette and nodding at something the second cop was saying. The cop scribbled in his notepad.

I went down the same way Danny did, almost losing my footing and falling onto the undercarriage of the inverted Fargo. The box had snapped right off, clean, against a tree, leaving the cedar skinned and naked by the impact. Steam was rising from the manifold. Both doors were sprung, the cab crushed. The second cop stared up at me.

“Stay away, son! There's nothing you can do.”

Nothing I can do?
I looked at him and then up ahead at Danny, who was standing beside a fourth figure I hadn't yet seen. But Danny wasn't looking at whoever it was. He was looking at me, waiting.

I ignored the cop and stepped forward. Danny moved as if to say something, but couldn't. At his feet was a lumpy grey blanket completely covering a body. All but the boots, small work boots worn black. At the head of the blanket was a small tin bucket splattered with red pulp. I thought it was blood but it wasn't.

Raspberries!

I looked back at the boots, up at Danny, and suddenly my knees buckled and I was down on them, spinning.

Ig.

The provincial police told Poppa the details. The rest he must have picked up in town when he went in to make the arrangements, because when he returned and walked slowly past my bedroom I could tell from his eyes that he knew I was somehow involved. He stopped and never even tried to speak. Just looked at me and then walked off in his stooped, tired manner. He seemed to have decided there was no point in saying anything.

Lacha had been charged with dangerous driving, I heard that much from overhearing Uncle Jan's and Poppa's talk in the kitchen. Criminal negligence, Jan added, and for carrying open alcohol in the truck and for drinking underage and for no insurance coverage as well. The charges could have gone on forever and they would never equal out. I imagined this moment in Lacha's house, him upstairs feeling sorry for himself, while his old man — I knew the bastard, too, the highway grader who'd probably built up that soft shoulder in the first place — he'd be downstairs comforting his wife by saying it wasn't as if the victim had been a real person, if you know what I mean.

Maybe not, but it was Ig. I pulled the pillow tighter to quieten the sobs. Christ, I hoped he never saw it coming. I prayed Lacha had swept around that corner and picked Ig off the side of the road before he even heard the truck. But I kept seeing him standing there with his shirt off the side of the road before he even heard the truck. But I kept seeing him standing there with his shirt off and his pot full of raspberries, his simple little damaged brain trying to figure out what he had done wrong that someone would be so eager to hurt him this way. Ig's natural assumption would be that it was his fault.