The Last Season (24 page)

I love this moment. Christ, you can take all your orgasms and fine wine and fancy restaurants and movies and music and compliments and financial windfalls and you can shove them where Torchy used to say only the customs agent's flashlight ever shines. I love
this
moment, no matter what anthem or what arena or what country, just me on one side and them on the other, everyone wondering what Batterinski is going to do.

“MoDo AIK” it says on their jerseys. Blood red, they make me think of the Soviets. And they're talking and laughing through the anthem like this game is the perfect chance to stick it to the damn Finns. I feel something I haven't felt since the Pomeranian Peewees went up against Renfrew. We didn't even have a name, for Jesus' sake, and them called the “Millionaires.” Them, with their old man's paycheques all over them: forty-dollar Tackaberry CCM skates, brand-new Hespeler Green Flash sticks, oversized pants with the sweater tucked just so in one side only, matching socks with not a single longjohn gap among them, Cooper armadillo thumb gloves — and them laughing the same way these Swedes are right now. The Pomeranian Peewees, with their hand-me-down skates and taped-over toes, undersized pants gaping the pink speckled flesh of underwear, mismatched socks, rings from sealer preserve jars holding in the pads, Tommy Nordowski's pads made by his old man from peeled hemlock bark and sewn together under the knee joint so he could bend, me playing with a wire splice taped around the heel of the stick blade by Poppa and filled in with Scotch pine pitch.

God but I loved that game. Every time I hit a Renfrew player I was hitting his old man too. And when Danny and I skated off together at the end, 5–3 winners, I stared right into their eyes when we walked up the coco matting to our dressing room, sneering when their own stares buckled into their coffees, spitting just before I kicked open the door with my skate toe, ripping a sliver free that they wouldn't dare mention. I had a right to do as I pleased. They, son and father, were beaten.

They can laugh at the start if they like. By the time it ends there'll be something else in their eyes: respect. I can feel it here the same way I felt it in Renfrew twenty-five years ago. I saw the look when we skated around in the warm-up. They weren't laughing at our uniforms — Tapiola makes sure we have the best of everything, even if the front crest does have a damn minnow swimming around on it — no, they were laughing because we were Finns. The NHL laugh when we were WHA. The Canadiens laugh when we were Kings. The Marlie look when we were Hardrocks. The North Bay look when we were Vernon. The Renfrew look when we were Pomeranian.

That look, everywhere, when you're a Pole.

First period over and it's Örnsköldsvik 3, Tapiola 0. With the horn I spin down ice where the scraper is just coming on and skate around slowly, pretending to be checking my sharp, waiting until the rest of the team gets to the dressing room. I come in last, yank the cigarette out of Pekka's mouth as I pass, grind it and then slam my stick into the side of the trash can, knocking it over, rolling.

“Pekka. You translate.”

Pekka nods. The room is deathly silent, waiting.

“Don't you
care
?” I say. I am not faking it this time. I am not cribbing Timo's research. This time I come on pure. “I'm ashamed to be in the same uniform as you, do you know that? You're playing like we've come here on some kind of a damn holiday or something. Don't you think there are finer places to visit? Have you no pride in yourselves as professionals? Tell me — don't you care?

“
They
care. You can see it out there the way they're laughing at us. Did you notice? Sure, they're laughing, because to them we're just a joke, a bunch of dumb-ass Finns and a goofy Canuck who doesn't know when to call it quits. That's fine, if that's the way you want it. Swedes are just better than Finns, obviously ... accept it. Tell me, please, what do
you
think?”

Matti stands up, rubbing his hands along the front of his pads like he's working in a kitchen. He speaks perfect English. “This is just exhibition, surely,” he says. “They were playing in front of their families and friends. This is their town. So it means something to them more than just a game. But it is not so important to us. What does it matter who wins?”

I cannot
believe
this! His first game? When Henri Richard went up to Montreal to join Maurice, it was understood that, even as brothers, they would not speak. In the Canadiens dressing room they accepted you after two years, minimum. Then you could talk.

“Do you really mean that?” I ask.

Matti seems surprised. He has his narrow focus on me, unable to see beyond. “Yes. Of course.”

“In that case,” I say, “you're cut from the team as of this very moment. Get dressed.”

Matti stares back, unbelieving. He does not know me well enough to know that I do not joke.

“Pekka,” I say. “Perhaps he doesn't understand English. Tell him so he understands.”

Reluctantly, Pekka begins, but before he can get into it, Matti cuts him off. “I understand perfectly,” he says. “Surely you joke, man.”

“Get dressed.”

“It's a meaningless game.”

“Not to me. Get dressed.”

“Do you really mean what you say?”

“Get dressed.”

Matti spins around in his nervous, narrow-focus way and finds nothing but heads bowed between knees; fingers on skate laces, taping sticks, adjusting pads; escape everywhere. He looks back at me, blows out some contemptuous air, sits down and throws down his stick and gloves.

“Be cleared out by the time we come in here again,” I say.

He doesn't answer. I don't expect him to.

“Okay now,” I say, and Pekka translates without being told. “Shall we go out and win this game?”

“Hakkaa p
ää
lle!”
Timo shouts, his timing perfect.

The dressing room erupts.

“Hakkaa p
ää
lle!”

Pekka takes the face-off easily, shouldering their gangly centre straight back so he falls and Pekka kicks the puck free. Penalty: interference. No matter. Tapiola Hauki has arrived, one period late. The box impenetrable, the icings sure and easy and delayed magnificently, the forechecking frenzied enough to bring panic to Örnsköldsvik, the panic delivering what we need.

We hold them with Pekka off, and they manage only one long slapper from the point that not one Swede forward dares try to tip with Batterinski and Timo standing guard, sticks raised like lances. Timo gloves it easily as it bounces off his shin and he baseballs the puck off his stick into the corner, where I take it off the boards. Not looking, the focus deliberately wide, I catch Pekka just stepping free of the penalty box this side of centre and I send a high, slow floater straight up ice, which he gloves while straddling the red line and cuffs ahead so it drops as he skates in, completely clear. Two head fakes and a shoulder drop and the Swede goalie is sliding on one pad straight out toward the face-off circle, staring back helplessly at Pekka tucking the puck into a corner of the empty net.

Our bench empties and Pekka is celebrated as if he has just wrapped up the Stanley Cup in overtime, Timo shouting “
Hakkaa
p
ää
lle
!
” in a sour voice at the still-kneeling goaltender as the arena erupts in angry whistles, a sound I had forgotten since Danny and I used to sneak smokes in the machine shop down at O'Malley's Mill and they'd be sharpening the bandsaws.

I hear my name follow Pekka's as they are ground from the public address system and Pekka gives me a small special tap on the rear as he skates through the octopus of team arms still reaching. I skate away, stick across knees, escaping into the clock, satisfied that he knows what made the goal possible. Let Pekka have the glory; Batterinski wants what lies beneath, what most people cannot see. The respect.

By the end of the period it is a 3–3 tie and Tapiola has played shorthanded for nearly fifteen of the twenty minutes. Timo has a major for drawing blood — he convinced the referee it was an accident, not requiring ejection, and actually apologized to the poor bastard he'd suckered with a butt end — and I picked up three minors myself, though by agreement with Jerkki I will not be claiming for them.

The third period is catered to us. We go ahead 4–3 on Pekka's second goal, a cheap one on a pass-out that goes in off a MoDo skate. Again Pekka is mobbed, the enthusiasm the same as for his first, though the goals are hardly worthy of the same name. But it doesn't matter. Sugar Bowles used to say a scoreboard only counts, it cannot measure.

This goal, the go-ahead that has come all the way, unaccosted, from a shutout, seems to get to the Örnsköldsvik players and fans. We play under constant whistle, if not the referee then the fans, and at times it is impossible to hear the referee's. MoDo presses, sending four men in, and I am reminded of another of Sugar's thoughts — if you want something to break, you need only to push too hard. Sure enough. Timo intercepts a point pass from them and breaks down two-on-one with Pekka on his right. Pekka knocks Timo's high pass out of the air and shifts right toward the boards, sucking the defenceman over as if he had a rope around him. He lips the puck and one-hands it through the lone defender's skates to Timo, and Timo, straightforward, predictable Timo, ignores fakes and shifts and dekes and stuns the MoDo goaltender by simply looking once at the net and rifling a high hard shot straight into his glove hand, the shot so hard and direct that the glove snaps back on the wrist and the puck falls like the top of a child's ice cream, plop on the goal line.

The light goes on, Pekka goes into his little dance, our bench empties and the MoDo goaltender rushes the referee, hurling his cage as he goes. A black-haired, ugly little man emerges, and I don't need to know Swedish to know he is claiming the puck did not go over the line; nor do I need glasses to see that the referee is not interested in arguing. The score is now 5–3 as far as he is concerned.

The goaltender, I think, is right. I like him. I like his rage and his blackness and his ugliness. I wonder if he was made a goaltender in Sweden the same way that boys with weak ankles are made goalies in Canada, only in this case the mark against him is looks. Not pure enough to play out; admissible only if he keeps it all behind the cage.

MoDo presses even harder and closes to within one goal, when I foolishly neglect to freeze the puck, trying to whip it around on the glass without realizing there is no glass, only wire, and the puck hits funny in one of the mesh squares and comes oddly back out in front, where a lanky Swede picks it out of the air and golfs the puck into the short side.

It is my fault entirely. I am angry again, no longer feeling for the goaltender or anyone, and when MoDo breaks down on us again Timo and I fix on the centre, knowing he is going to try and split us, using the wingers for decoy. He dumps the puck past and leaps, as we knew he would, and Timo and I bear-trap him, sticks straight into his kidneys. He falls like trash, not flesh, and the puck slides harmlessly into the waiting glove of our goaltender.

Such a play, naturally, is beyond them. The centre does not move, but lies where Timo and I have left him. The referee's whistle reaches above the crowd's and aims at me, a police siren sorting the traffic without knowing its direction. I skate off to a hosanna of whistling, pausing only to bow before entering the penalty box.

I realize instantly how spoiled I have become by North American hockey. In Philadelphia I would be entering a bunker, glass on three sides of me, two leather-jacketed city cops with nightsticks and .38 calibre convincers hanging eagerly off their hips. In L.A. one cop, but more glass; in Boston less glass, but perhaps four cops. Here, in Örnsköldsvik, no glass, no cops, the penalty bench simply a red slab behind a swingdoor beside the announcer's seat, nothing between me and the seats but a throng of seething fans, some, for my benefit, trying out North American booing.

I swing my stick harmlessly at them and they break like hay, folding back on themselves. One of them, a puffy-faced man with his neck wrapped too many times in red wool, probably a team scarf, leans forward and spits directly into my face.

Spits.

Spits
at Batterinski.

It lands on my cheek just below my left eye, and is cool as it slides down. I do not wipe it off. I wear it.

Those who cannot understand such things will say this is a rash decision caused by an uncontrollable temper. But this is not at all what happens. I am not out of control; I am in control. I step over the bench straight onto the cement, moving deliberately slowly, letting the spit drip under its own power from my face. The puffy-faced man floods with terror and bursts from the crowd. Wonderfully in control, I give chase, my skates ringing and rasping as I step and then run, the crowd splitting like a zipper as I pass in pursuit of the dancing red scarf.

Up the stairs he goes toward the overhead ramp. Up the stairs I go, out through the lobby, the far doors and into the night. The spitter knows by the singing of my skates that I follow, and in the light snow of the parking lot I hear him scream as he realizes his escape is not yet complete.

He leaves tracks, and I do not even have to look up to follow. His tracks lead up the entry road toward some leafless bushes ahead. I cannot see him and am convinced he is gone, but then, above even the sound of my skates, I hear him breathing.

He is behind the bushes, hiding, leaning over onto his knees. His breath is wet, gagging. He cannot even beg me not to kill him.

I do not want to kill him.

I am not even angry.

All I want is for him to acknowledge that Batterinski has taken the spit and put it back where it belongs. Simply, effortlessly, I pull him up by his scarf and then release it so he falls back on his rear end, then push his fur hat so he is on his back, still gasping. The large flakes of snow melt instantly on his face, making it appear as if he is in tears. Perhaps he is.