The Last Season (35 page)

“You know that's wrong.”

“I don't know how Jaja ever stood her, I don't.”

Poppa's voice went hard. “You're right. You don't.”

We walked on further, not speaking until we reached the cedars at the far end of the flats. I felt badly that I had angered Poppa. My fight was with the bitch, not him. “How far you planning to go?” I asked, pumping enthusiasm into my voice.

“I might see if that jet pump is in at Betz's.”

“You're going to
walk
all the way to town!”

“Of course I'm going to walk. Can't you do it anymore, big hockey player, eh?” Poppa laughed, the distance between us vanishing.

I laughed back at him, glad for his company.

“Of course I can do it. I just wonder why, when there's a perfectly good car sitting back there.”

“Let it sit. They see me in that thing and they'll be saying your success has gone to my head.”

“No they wouldn't.”

“Why did you get it?'

“It's a great car.”

“People look at it, am I right?”

“Sure they look.”

“Well, there you go.”

Der
you go. What did that mean?

“Where I go?”

“You didn't buy it for its machinery. You bought it so you could wear it, like those Fancy Dan clothes of yours. If Walter Batterinski could drive into town in a vehicle that looked like him, he'd come in a chainsaw.”

“You're being crazy, Poppa.”

We walked on, content to be silent. I, too, was happier walking with Poppa than I would have been alone in the Corvette, but I was also dreading our coming to Shannon's, hoping Danny would not be visiting his parents. When we crested the cedar turn I could see only the gutted cars in the yard. Not the truck. Not the big Packard Poppa said Danny was driving lately. Old Mrs Shannon would be inside, but she would stay there even if she saw us. A woman in Pomerania does not presume anything unless her husband or sons are there. She would take note and report, and hope that the next time we passed, Martin would be there to haul us in for a drink or two and a few blessed moments away from her eternal drudgery. No wonder the church ran thickest in the veins of the women. Prayer was like talking to a fresh face.

“You got rats in California?”

“
Rats
? You mean like big mice?”

Poppa impersonated me. “‘You mean like big mice?' — Of course I mean like big mice. You got them?”

“Well I suppose so. Not at our place though.”

“We got 'em at the house. Can you hear them at night? They gnaw in the back shed.”

“No I haven't.”

“Damn summer's too wet. No berries. Too many snakes. Too much muck for holes. They've been coming in since June. I can't get rid of them. Catch maybe one a week by traps. But I gotta get some proper poison.”

“Betz's should have some.”

“I tried theirs. Didn't work. Maybe I'll have Batcha mix up some. She's done it before, but it's hard to get the chemicals these days with all them regulations.”

“How can she make better than what they sell?”

“I can hunt better meat than what they sell. Why couldn't she make better rat killer than what they sell? I already tried what they sell and it didn't work.”

“Why don't you just set traps? We used to.”

“They're too smart. It's like setting a table for them. I get some but not enough.”

We passed the corner where Ig died and Poppa never mentioned the accident. There were guard posts up now where the half-ton had drifted over the embankment, and below it was all overgrown with maples and saplings and poplar, and just to the front of the saplings a great, luxurious raspberry patch. Ig's raspberries. His monument.

The pump wasn't in. Poppa ordered his rat chemicals from old Betz and then suggested we hike further up Old Donald Hill toward St. Martin's. Twice half-tons stopped smack in the middle of the highway, the drivers riding their clutches while they leaned unconcernedly out the window and laughed with Poppa and welcomed me home. Both said they were Kings fans as of last January and I told both — Jerzy Palowski and Donny Betz, both from the mill — that they'd have to come out to California to see a game live. I'd get them tickets, I said, even put them up. Both pulled away, delighted with the invitation, petrified by the possibility.

“You glad to be home, eh, Felix?” Jerzy asked in a voice like a panting dog.

“Sure.”

He looked beyond us, toward the church spires. “No place like this in California, eh?”

I answered honestly. “That's for damn sure.”

Jerzy seemed even more delighted with this than with his invitation. His — and probably Donny's — dedication to the Kings was merely a formality. My real worth to them was if they could wrangle some reinforcement from me that their petty Pomeranian lives were indeed worth living. They weren't envious of my life; they weren't even much interested in the Kings or California. What they cared about more was that Batterinski, who had seen both Pomerania and Los Angeles, believed Pomerania to be the superior place.

“This here's God's country,” I said to Jerzy, stressing the
dis.

I wasn't lying. Pomerania suited God perfectly. Filled to the brim with suffering and true believers.

We passed one of the old railway houses, where a man hailed Poppa from an upper window where he was scraping paint. He had a cap on, but not pulled low enough that I couldn't see the large dent in his forehead. Old Sikorski, from down at the lake. From the cartons and full half ton in the yard he must have just moved in. He worked with the wire brush as he talked, many of his words indecipherable for the rasping, but it didn't matter. We needed very little of what he said — “...Leafs stink ... you'd think Indians had been living here ... goddamn tourists fucked the speckle fishing ... Trudeau's a fucking communist ... no one's shoving French down his throat…” — to stand and nod in sympathy.

A woman appeared in the window behind him, holding a new brush and a purple stained paint can. Thick with the Pomeranian look, there was something about her I couldn't fix on, and waited until we'd all cursed the tax department a few more times and taken our leave before I asked Poppa about her.

“It's the same wife,” Poppa said with a look of surprise.

“But she was dying of cancer.” I saw the thin, crying woman at the kitchen table, waiting for Batcha.

“Well she didn't.”

“What happened?”

“How should I know? I never asked. She got better. The cancer went away.”

Poppa didn't seem interested in talking about it. And I couldn't ask. Was Mrs Sikorski saved by doctors? By prayer? By the bitch Batcha? By cutting the heart out of a poor cat? Poppa would laugh if I asked.

“You're sure it's the same woman?” I asked.

Poppa blew his nose against his finger, disgusted. “This isn't California, Felix. People don't get divorced here, remember?”

“Okay, but maybe she died and he remarried.'

Poppa looked at me as if I'd taken leave of my senses. “And nobody noticed?”

I let it drop. The sun beat against my back and my fishnet shirt was stuck to me like Saran Wrap, but not stuck tight enough to prevent the shiver. Last night there was wax in my bedroom door keyhole again. I poked it out with a coathanger, knowing it would be useless to complain to Poppa. I knew also it would be in place again when I returned. The bitch at work.

Poppa led the way up the hill and through the church parking lot, on up past the newly split winter wood and into the graveyard. I followed silently. Some grass was thick, with grasshoppers snapping off in long arches around us. Some grass was freshly scythed and raked into a corner, where it was drying yellow. There were careful paths about the stones and wooden crosses, and where the end path petered out in the far eastern corner there was the Batterinski family plot.

Poppa stopped in front of Jaja's marker, carefully removing his straw hat. Jaja had a cross with flaking white paint, small diamonds whittled at the three exposed corners, his name chiselled in Polish and painted black, his dates, 1861–1955, and, at the end,
prosie zdróvas
: “He beseeches a Hail Mary.”

“Here's Ig,” Poppa said.

I looked over. He was pointing to a settled, worn area marked only with four cornerstones. At the head of the grave was a small, cracked encasement of plastic flowers. They were doing precisely what they were invented not to do: wilt. The colours were washed out, the stems sagging and the flowers folding in on each other to form joining globs. It must have been the heat and the years. But Poppa made no move to remove the case.

“Batcha misses him terribly,” Poppa said, his voice uneven.

“We all do.” I said.

“But her most of all. She thought he was hers, to protect.”

“And then he got killed.”

“And then he got killed.” Poppa repeated.

There was nothing to gain in saying so, but I couldn't contain it. “And she blames me.”

“She blames herself. It was her suggestion that he go after the berries.”

“It was my friends.”

“But it was not
you
.”

Poppa moved beyond Ig's grave. I tried to follow, but couldn't. I stood over the grave and bowed my head, unable to make my hand stop instinctively making the sign of the cross over my heart. I hadn't done that for years. I hadn't even prayed since Clarkie had had the dumb idea that we should all attend a nondenominational service as a team, something that turned into a once-only disaster when Torchy let squeak a silent stinky that had us shaking like boiling kettles when the preacher announced “The Lord is all around you!” and Torchy sniffed loudly and answered with, “Is
that
what that is?”

Poppa dropped to his knees and kissed the earth carefully. It was another plain marker like Jaja's, again with plastic flowers but also a small, encased box containing a plaster cast of Jesus' head and upraised arms, looking pained and, unfortunately, half-buried in the grass.

Poppa stood back up. “Your Matka,” he said, his voice slipping.

Poppa's eyes were shining when he stepped back, and turned toward the church. He walked with his hands behind his back, playing with the brim of his hat; his eyes worked along the markers, reading, recognizing, remembering. I stared at my mother's marker, leaning forward but afraid to step on the grass over her. The dates were difficult to make out, the weather having eaten away much of the black paint and leaving only letters formed by shadows in the chisel work. Her birth was clear, 1914, but not the final date. But that I knew by heart: my birthday.

I felt sick. I went down on my knees — to hell with the grass stains — and I simply waited for the tears to come. They squeezed out of my closed eyes, around the corners of my nose and dropped off my upper lip. I wanted to hit something. I wanted to take my two hands and pound them into the soil until I, too, was gone from the face of the Earth.

Had Poppa brought me here deliberately so I could see my conscience laid out before me in perfect rows: Jaja, a heart attack doing my chores — so I could make Father Schula's useless hockey practice; Ig, mowed down by my so-called buddies; Matka, dead because Felix Batterinski was too much to bear.

Too much to bear
— even then!
What in God's name was happening to me?
Two weeks after I sign the best contact of my career I'm acting like this? What kind of an idiot am I? Why have I come here?

I belong in California with the sun tonguing my back, not here. Batterinski's record is written up in the
NHL Guide,
not here, not some spooky graveyard in village that has nothing more significant going for it than a goddamn road kill on the side of a tourist highway.

God's country indeed!

Poppa and I walked home together with our own thoughts, me thinking of going in to see Danny and Poppa thinking God knows what. We passed by the spruce where I had hidden the leather cowboy hat and still not a word was said. We both knew better than to mention it. It could rot, for all I cared. It would serve a porcupine better than me.

I washed my pants when we got home, but the stain remained on the knees. I tried bleach and the grass faded, but only slightly. More bleach but still the stain would not go. Matka's stain. The mark of my mother's grave. I buried the pants out in the ash dump, overturning several dead rats as I dug, all with their mouths broken up and tongues leaping from the crush of the trap. I felt they were sticking out their tongues at me, laughing at me, laughing at the California I was trying to bury.

Danny sat waiting on the steps of his house. He and Lucy had taken over one of the square railroad houses that had been tacked onto the hill like coathangers, which is all they were intended to be, a place to put the line workers up for the night, and then abandoned by the railroad when the idea of a grain line from the Great Lakes through to Ottawa seemed as likely as sending fresh water back. Danny's was newly painted pink on three sides, black tar-paper with the Johns-Manville factory stamp providing a little relief on the east side, where the wind blew least. The Packard was in a drive someone had forced onto the hill with crib support, fill and enough stolen planking from the mill to finish off Danny's east side four times over. The car was massive, longer than the drive, blacker than the tar-paper. Had there been a wreath on the back window I might have crossed myself.

Danny was glowing. A single-stranded shaft of yellow light was slipping through the white pine further onto the hill, a light that seemed cleansed and crisp and angled, and it settled on Danny like an ill-exposed photograph. He sat, knees spread wide for his gut, cigarette as comfortable in his fingers as nails, a half-empty, glowing brown beer bottle at his side, and he was wearing an Ottawa football jersey. When he saw the car was the Corvette he'd been expecting, he stood, stretched and stepped off the steps like a Buddha descending.