The Last Season (34 page)

“Still good for that ride?”

“Still good, old friend.”

Sugar nodded, calculating. “Up and down Main Street?”

“Anywhere you like,” I said.

We did both sides of Main Street twice, with Sugar shouting, screaming, laughing at every pedestrian and driver he knew or thought he might know. He leaned out and slapped the side of the Corvette like it was a pony express as we hurtled down from the theatre past the old Muskoka Hotel. He made sure there wasn't a soul in all of Vernon who didn't know the house-league squirt coach was being chauffeured about town by a true National Hockey League star. He wanted them all to know Ted Bowles was good enough for me, if not for them. And when I turned the corner by Riley's hardware store, Sugar leaned as far as he could out the window and honked his nose at Des Riley, who was standing by the jackknife display watching his precious town parade before him. I goosed the car and we squealed up past the hardware store and out the Lock's Road toward Sugar's home and a passed-out Willie.

I ate at the new steakhouse by the Canadian Tire, where a massive waitress came to my table with deliberate slowness and contempt, chewing gum and reaching slowly for the pad tucked into her apron.

“Youse want a menu?” she asked.

“Please.”

She turned to remove one from another table and I tried to fix the face. It was like an advertising balloon that had been blown up too far, making the message illegible. Shrunken, the face would be beautiful. But the body below was so fat you'd have to roll her in flour just to find the wet spot.

I wondered all through a hot beef with peas, puzzled through the coffee. And the answer came only when she slipped the check onto my table with the bubblegum popping “Thanks.” The price was $8.79, the party was one, and the waitress was Maureen.

Maureen the Queen.

I left no tip.

Poppa came to the door expecting a worm sale. With the sun flush on the screen, he seemed drawn on graph paper in a scale smaller than I remembered, though I had seen him at Christmas. No, I'm mistaken. For a day and a half the previous spring after the playoffs. So it had been more than a year. He was in his seventies and beginning to stoop. His hair was finally greying, and longer, meaning he was not going to town much. His eyes were failing. For a moment he danced behind the screen, feinting like a boxer as he tried to shield the sun and make out who it was in the yard. He opened the door tentatively, and by the time it slammed shut he was already at the car.

He grabbed me exactly the way Sugar had, almost as if we were wrestlers waiting for the referee to slap the mat to begin. But he was so much taller than Sugar. Even stooped, when he came into me it was my face, not his, that found the shoulder. I breathed deep: all the sweat oil and gasoline and pine pitch and cedar chips and sawdust and dead minnows and cooking grease and the lime of my childhood. He smelled the way I remembered Jaja. He walked the way I remembered Jaja walking, the slight stoop, the delicate step that said all was not right in the privates.

Poppa had grown into Jaja, but I had not grown into Poppa. I had grown into Batterinski, Frankenstein,
Canucklehead
— and now I sensed I was retreating. But where?

“Batcha! Batcha!” Poppa called as he held the screen open for me with his knee. “Look at who's here!”

Batcha did not answer. Poppa turned, apologetic: “Sometimes she doesn't hear so good.”

I nodded. Poppa did not call again.

Inside, the house was exactly as I had left it: a calendar on every wall, one from 1967 but with a picture of Queen Elizabeth II that never went out of date; the pots hung on nails over the sink; the hand pump. Poppa saw me eye the stairs.

“Nothing's changed. Your room's exactly as it was the last night you slept here. Haven't even changed the sheets.”

Da
sheets. I was indeed home, exactly as it was.

“You still got the minnow setup?”

Poppa looked cross. “Don't you think you should see your Batcha before the goddamn minnows?”

I can see her as perfectly today as I did that day, because she left me some-thing that makes me shiver to this day to think of it. Batcha was in the sitting room, dozing in her rocker with the blinds half drawn. She wore her black uniform, long sleeves with a white Kleenex tuck, buttoned shoes, thick brown cotton stockings, wrinkled. Her hair was blacker than Poppa's and healthy, but her face was far
thinner,
giving in more and more to the skull beneath. Her cheeks were sunken, her mouth parted, her eyes deep and shrouded by black heavy brows. But when they opened and settled on me, they burned me with all their old strength, recognition settling into memory, forming hatred.

“Hello, Batcha,” I said with forced sincerity. “How are you?”

“Hello, Felix,” she said. Her voice full of air, empty.

“Batcha's ninety this summer, you know, Felix,” Poppa said, knowing he would have to force the conversation. “She tires easily, but she's glad you're home.”

Poppa said this just so it would be said, officially.

The white eyes stared at me and then rolled away, Batcha drifting back to sleep. Poppa shrugged and pulled the blinds down quietly, taking my arm as we left the room where Jaja and Ig had lain before burial. The closed blinds turned the room ink black and I stumbled, my eyes slow to adjust, and when I reached to catch myself I caught on Batcha's rocker arm and her hand. The hand ice-cold, recoiling like a snake. It was a sensation I would not forget.

How strange to be back in my old room, the smell of must rising from the mattress. Poppa's stolen lumber-camp blanket was folded carefully at the foot of the bed so the moth holes wouldn't show; the pine dresser had new linoleum tacked on it; the blind was now permanently rusted and rotted at half mast, the exposed portion bleached near white, the rolled half as green as Poppa's new aluminium siding. Dead bluebottles were so thick between the storm and the inside window that the flies formed a mass graveyard deeper than the frame. I opened it, swept the flies out onto the shed roof, and propped the storm open with a boot for air. The air that entered contained Poppa's chainsaw and the outside but at least it was new air, something my room hadn't seen for years.

I lay there in brand-new silken B.V.D. pajamas. In the rough-cut doorless closet, on four of the only unravelled coathangers in the house, were a light houndstooth jacket from Lou Myles, a blue serge sports jacket, two light blue and a single light brown pair of slacks from Lou, a white pair of painter pants that flattered my thighs, several polo shirts and a couple of Newcombe tennis shirts. Below, on the floor, sat my Nikes and a hundred-and-twenty-dollar pair of penny loafers. And that didn't include the ties, the running shorts, the thigh socks, the underwear still sealed in plastic, my leather cowboy hat or the several L.A. Kings caps I'd stashed in the drawers of the dresser. I had more invested in the contents of my suitcase than Poppa had in the house. Absurd, I know, but he would hear nothing of my suggestion that we tear it down and I pay for a new one.

“That siding cost me $750,” he said, settling the issue forever.

In the morning I found him just beyond the shed, to the side of the ash dump. He had an old, blackened and torn camp blanket out and had assembled the parts of the kerosene engine for the washing machine on it while he washed everything down with gasoline.

“What's wrong?” I asked.

“Goddamn carburetor's gone. Worn out. And I can't get any diaphragms no more so I cut my own out of leather. I don't know whether it will work or not.”

“Forget it!”

“Forget it?” he said, still scrubbing. “The tank's still good. The roller works perfect. It'll work perfect if the diaphragm sets.”

“You've electricity now, Poppa, get a proper machine.”

“Not too fussy about electricity. Somebody else put it out on you. This I can bugger up or fix on my own.”

“You don't have to tell me you're not fussy about it. There's hardly a light in the house.”

“Batcha likes it that way. We don't need any more.”

“But Poppa, that's why I sent you that money. So you'd have things like that.”

Poppa looked insulted. “I got the siding up, didn't I? You never even said anything about it.”

“I noticed it right away.”

“Well, there. See. It's darned nice too, isn't it?”

“Lovely.”

Poppa grunted his approval and returned to his scrubbing.

“Look Poppa. Isn't it about time you let me pay you back for a few things you've done for me?”

Poppa put down an idle valve and looked up, smiling, “I don't want your money, son. You keep it.”

“Not money. I want you to have a few things around here. Things you should have.”

“But I've got everything I want.”

“You're half a century behind the times. I like a shower. I can't have a shower here.”

“Batcha and me wouldn't even know how to have one.”

“Well I don't care what you say, Poppa. I've got good money now and you're going to enjoy some of it and that's that.”

Poppa looked up and blinked once. “Save it,” he said harshly. “You might need it.”

I laughed, savouring the moment. “Poppa. Don't you understand? I'm set for life.”

Poppa went back to pouring gasoline on his scrub rag. “No one's ever set for life, Felix. They only set you for death.”

“Very funny, Poppa. I'm going into town. You're going to have some changes around here whether you want them or not.”

Poppa spit to the side of the camp blanket, but whether to clear his mouth or speak his mind, I couldn't say. By week's end I had an electrician out from Renfrew to put in some proper lights and upstairs wiring, a plumber from Vernon over to put in a proper toilet, a front-end loader and three trucks of gravel from Eganville to set a septic tank and make a weeping bed, a hot-water tank, hot-water piping and a full tub and shower enclosure for what used to be Ig's room. I also bought a new electric washing machine, a new double stainless steel sink for the kitchen, faucets, traps, electric baseboard heaters they could plug in to supplement the basement wood furnace in winter, and two fire extinguishers to ease Poppa's fretting about all the new wiring.

Poppa said nothing, which I took as acceptance, but the old bitch was outraged, particularly over the invasion of Ig's room. She stopped speaking to me completely. The day the electrician wired she refused to let him come into her room, locking herself in by working a butcher's knife across the frame. I was about to boot it in on her when Poppa came up and put a hand on my shoulder.

“I'm going for a walk,” he said. You want to come along?”

Our second “walk.” And even hotter than when Poppa had chewed me out for chopping down the bitch's goddamn aspen. Poppa walked in Kodiak workboots so stubbed the steel toes had worn through. I wore my wedge-heeled suction cupped Nikes. Poppa was in his summer longjohns and green hydro pants. I had on my white painter jeans and a fishnet blue tank top. Poppa was bareheaded. I wore my stiff, ten-pound leather handcrafted cowboy hat, and felt like a damned fool.

I took it off and stared at the brim, already blackening with sweat. I danced to the side of the road, lifted a spruce bough and laid the cap carefully under the apron, concealing it.

Poppa laughed. “I don't blame you.”

“Nobody'll see it there.”

“A porky finds it he'll eat it.”

“Porky finds it he can wear it.”

We walked on a bit, almost to the creek, before Poppa spoke again.

“You must go easy on Batcha, Felix. I don't think she's very well anymore.”

“Then get her to a doctor.”

Poppa laughed. “For fifty years they've come to her as a doctor. She thinks medical doctors are as trustworthy as they think she is. She won't hear of it.”

“Then tell her to cure herself.”

Poppa clicked his tongue in condemnation. “Son, son, son — you must change your attitude toward her. Batcha loves you as much as me. She just can't say.”

We stopped on the bridge and stared upstream. A crane flushed at the sound of the gravel we turned, falling through the scaffolding; we could hear the wings slowly pushing through the air as it rose, the sound and speed of a sleeping baby's breath.

I didn't want to hurt Poppa, but I had to let him know how I felt. “How can you stand living there?”

Poppa spit into the river, watched it vanish beneath his feet. “I never think about it that way. She's there and I'm there and that's the way it is.”

“She must drive you nuts.”

“No. Not at all.”

“How can you put up with all her hocus-pocus?”

“How has it hurt me?”

I kicked some gravel into the river, turned and walked on.

Poppa wasn't finished: “Her ideas are no worse than Father Schula's, as far as I'm concerned.”

I had to laugh. “Aren't you speaking heresy, Poppa?”

“No, I do not. Batcha is as good to that church as the fathers are themselves. Who's to say what they read out of their books — not the Bible, but their church books — is any more right than what she was taught by respected elders back in the old country? Her type is very regarded back there, son. It's only over here, with television and all that, that people stop believing. And I ask you, is the world any better for it?”

I couldn't be bothered answering. “Why couldn't Jan take her?”

“Jan has asked her. She says this is her home and it is, no one can argue about that.”

I stopped. “Well
I
can, Poppa. It's my home too, and she makes me feel like some sort of disease that snuck in through the cracks in the floor.”

Poppa seemed weary of it all. “She loves you. Believe me.”

“I can't. Because she doesn't.” My voice was sharp, hurt.