The Last Season (39 page)

Tracy must have felt the power, because she was willing to try again to reach the atheist. “Was it the Roman Catholic faith itself?”

“I don't follow.”

“Did you get turned off by the church?”

“I just stopped going. Like school, eh?”

“But something must have turned you away, surely?”

She was not going to give up. But I could not tell her. I could not go over Ig's death with someone like her. Not even with Torchy. Not even with the old Torchy. I couldn't even go over it with myself. There weren't thoughts to ride with the feelings.

I quoted from Revelations. “But because though art lukewarm, and neither cold, nor hot, I will begin to spue thee out of my mouth.”

“Torchy looked up, the smile dropping, “What's that?”

I was amused. “How can you come on so holy all the time and not know anything about the Bible?”

Tracy smiled. “There's more to being a Christian than reading the Bible, Bats.”

“And more to it than luck too.”

She was perplexed. “What's that supposed to mean?”

I laughed, too loud. “Look at your convert, for Christ's sake.” I pointed unnecessarily to Torchy, who seemed hurt. “God is nothing more than a rabbit's foot to him. If he plays well with God he'll hang on to God. If he goes into a slump he'll try some new tape or a new stick or a new pair of skates — more likely a new God.”

Tracy's eyes were watering. “That's
not
true!”

“It
is
true and he knows it.” Again, I indicated Torchy unnecessarily. “You come on to me like I'm some kind of heretic or something, but look at yourselves. It's a joke. Do you know what they're saying about you?”

I stared at Tracy, waiting. I wanted to stop, but couldn't. This was like a hockey fight, time not quite slowed until I'd landed a punch, hard.

“No,” she said, voice thin as a prayer book. “What?”

I made it up. “That Torchy got religion just so he could get you.”

“Cool it, Bats,” Torchy warned. It was his voice before being born-again, the old Torchy speaking.

Tracy turned to Torchy, then back to me. “That's
not
true!”

“
Bats
...” Torchy's voice was hard, threatening, like dropping gloves.

I dropped mine and swung hard.

“Look — I don't give a shit what you do. Just don't sit in judgment of other people, that's all. And don't try and force your bullshit religion on me, either. You watch, old friend. You run into trouble and you'll drop this phoney shit in a second.”

I was wrong. Torchy showed true Christian charity that night and didn't put a chair through my head. But Tracy stopped speaking to me and barely said another word all winter and on into the spring. Without discussing it we divided up the house. They got the chapel and the whole quarter around Torchy's bedroom. We took shifts in the kitchen. I got the pool mornings, they had it afternoons; the hot tub we split the other way around. They probably saw it as heaven and hell.

The Kings flattened out as quickly as they'd risen. We'd dropped from second to third to forth and began worrying about the cellar. Torchy's scoring fell off but — much to my surprise — not his prayer meetings nor his obsession with Tracy.

That didn't end until the following season, on a red light at Santa Barbara. Torchy and Tracy had spent the weekend hiking between the Santa Ines mission and Santa Barbara, leaving just enough time to spare to make it back for a night game against Minnesota. Torchy must have been hurrying. He cut the caution light a little too fine and swung out onto 101 straight into a black Cadillac barrelling down from San Francisco.

We didn't hear about it until after the game. Some of the guys were bitching about Torchy not showing and the boss was talking about a fine when the phone rang. One of the rookies overheard Torchy's name being mentioned and assumed it was a trade or, more than likely, considering the way he'd been playing of late, a quick trip to the minors for the fading veteran. But it was neither.

Torchy was in a coma at the Santa Barbara hospital. His leg was broken. He had undetermined internal injuries. Someone else had been in the car and was dead.

Torchy came through the next day and three days later was listed in “fair” condition, able to receive visitors. Some of the guys wanted to go as a team, but I said I had to see him alone and they understood. Most knew how long our friendship went back, none of them knew how far our differences stretched.

He was sitting up when I entered. I had a card signed by everyone on the team, a separate card from management, a box of strange goodies from Hirohito, the gardener. But Torchy wasn't interested. He was wrapped where the glass had gone into his temple and the skin near the eye was the colour of the Sudbury sun going down behind the smelter. His leg was wired up and weighted. A tube went in through the forearm, dripping.

He stared as if not sure who it was. I smiled but he did not smile back. I laid the cards and gifts on the night table but he never even followed with his eyes.

“Hi,” I said.

He nodded. I stared at him and could see the water rising in his eyes and spilling. He made no move to wipe them. He tried to speak but his jaw hurt him and he held it to finish.

“Satisfied?”

It was Torchy's old voice. I stared, not comprehending. He looked through tears, but the eyes themselves were frozen solid, sharp as icicles. And then the eyes closed and I was gone. Shut out.

I went out running, up Hawthorne and across the Palos Verdes hills toward the ocean. The wind was out of the southwest, at my back, as I picked my way along the shore between Point Vincente Lighthouse and Rocky Point, where the best view of the sea was. When I made it, I figured to have come better than twelve miles in less than ninety minutes. My UCLA shirt was stuck to me, my thighs raw along the inside where the thighs rubbed, the outside tendon of my left knee stiffened to the point where it burned to step forward on any downgrade. When I reached the point I climbed to the highest overhang and sat, arms wrapped around knees, Nikes and socks off, breathing deep. Below, the sea broke on the outrocks, the crush so violent it soothed, the sea spitting up at me, as I deserved.

Torchy was finished hockey even before he predicted he would be out. And, as he had said, I lasted a bit longer because no one ever expected fists to travel quite as fast as legs. But the day came — yes, as he had said it would — when I might have been better advised to use my legs rather than hands, and scram.

I'd know it was coming since the start of the 1978–79 season, when a goddamn college punk decked me during an exhibition game in Minnesota. It made a big splash in all the papers, and I think only because this big goof was an American and the Yanks saw it all as some kind of American invasion or something. Victory over a foreign power, that sort of thing. Whatever it was, no one bothered to mention it was a sucker punch, which it was, and no one seemed to take much note when in the first regular game against the North Stars I cut the creep for ten stitches late in the third. What they did note was that we blew our lead and they came back to score twice and win with us at a man disadvantage. The man, me. Batterinski fading.

Since then it had been, in a single word,
embarrassing
. A month down at New Haven in the minors, two months back with the Kings. Six months with the Kings, four in the minors. It made no difference to my pay, but it hurt in other ways. I made noises in the press about wanting a trade — I figured sure one of the Old World Hockey teams coming into the NHL Hartford say, could use me regularly — but the Kings leaked to the press that I'd been put on league waivers several times without so much as a sniff from another team. It was my big contract, of course. When Vincent Wheeler negotiated an extension through to June of 1982 he hamstrung both me and the Kings. And if I was more like Torchy I would have prayed to God to arrange a conference call to get me out of this mess. I wanted to go. They wanted me to go. And we just needed the right person to ask. Hartford, Winnipeg, Quebec, I didn't care. I just wanted the one last chance to prove I could still do it, and then go out the champ. Surely anyone could understand that....

God must have been listening in on the game, because the call finally came. March 11, 1981. They caught me at home. It was the general manager, George Maguire, and I was instantly grateful that I wouldn't be hearing about it this time through the press, as had happened in Philadelphia. I was neither curt nor hurt over the phone, but completely decent. This would be a gentleman's agreement, of mutual benefit to both parties.

Hartford, here I come!

“Dr. Buss wants to see you, Bats.”

The owner himself. It
had
to be good.

I drove up the San Diego Parkway, hoping a direct route might mean a straight deal. Why Buss? No one had been able to figure him out since he bought the team from Cooke. He was a strange, sad-looking man with Marlboro moustache, thinning hair and a voice that couldn't possibly belong to a land developer who might soon be a billionaire. The team was fascinated with Buss and what he might mean for us. He already came up with $600,000 a year to keep Dionne happy. Maybe he was prepared to buy my contact out at face value. I might clear $200,000. Maybe more.

I raced in past the secretaries. Buss was sitting in his black leather chair, feet up, eyes closed, and I thought for a moment I might be interrupting him — Torchy had said Buss was so smart he and a friend used to play Monopoly without a board, just the dice — but his eyes opened slowly and fixed on me with their slow sadness.

“Felix, come in, please. We've been waiting.”

I entered and noticed there were already two other men inside. And Maguire too. I had seen nothing of them. Had they waited patiently while I drove and Buss slept? The two men did not look hockey, both were sitting extremely straight, with sober grey suits and slick, patent leather briefcases on their laps. They did not look at all like scouts.

All stood when I entered.

“Felix,” Maguire began as he came from the side, face hanging like a hound. “This is Mr. Cousins and Mr. — eh —”

“Dunton,” the smaller man offered. Bald, with thick glasses, he looked like a banker. The other man, despite the similar suit and briefcase was taller, leaner and with short-cropped brown hair looked like a detective. It was he who stepped forward to speak, taking my hand like a priest at a funeral.

“We're with the IRS, Mr. Batterinski.”

My heart skipped and swallowed a small cough. Income tax?

“Please,” Buss said. ”Everyone sit down.”

We sat. The smaller man, Dunton, opened his briefcase and hauled out a thick document.

“We understand you to be a client of Mr. Vincent Brammar Wheeler of New York City and New Jersey. Is that correct?”

“I am.”

He handed me the document. “This, Mr. Batterinski, is a subpoena. I'm sorry to have to inform you of this, but Mr. Wheeler has been charged by the United States District Attorney's office of New York City with 103 counts of fraud.”

“Vincent?”

“Yes sir.”

Buss rattled the top off a jelly bean jar and popped a handful, talking through the chew. “He stole your money Felix.”

I stared at him and then the other two men. “Is that true?”

Cousins spoke, his tone like the cop at the catch end of a radar trap. “It is alleged that Wheeler misappropriated funds that were held by his company in trust. The 103 charges involve monies that belong to you and sixteen other professional athletes.”

My eyes spun about the room. Maguire was staring into his hands. Buss was picking jelly beans from his gums. Dunton was scribbling in a notebook and Cousins was staring at me, smiling, the glad bearer of bad news.

“How much?” I asked.

“Nothing has been proved in a court of law Mr. Batterinski.”

“How much do you think?”

“His records have been confiscated. But I'm afraid we don't know yet.”

“But you must have some idea?”

He must have detected the desperation in my voice. The cop uniform slid off momentarily. “Off the record?” he asked.

I nodded. This sounded like our locker room.

“If the charges are correct he's bilked you out of maybe $300,000.”

“Three
hundred
thousand?”

He nodded and Dunton shook his head and
tsked
, but whether in disapproval of what Cousins was saying or of what Wheeler had done I couldn't say, or care less.

Dunton suddenly spoke up. You weren't the worse hit, if it's any satisfaction.”

No, it wasn't. Our dry-wall idea had gone bust; now I felt my apartment building caving in on top of me, and my investments closing in like muck around a rubber boot.

I turned back to Cousins. “Why would he do it?”

“The state is going to contend to pay off gambling debts.”

What did it matter how he'd done it? All the time I thought he was up in Torchy's room beating himself to death he was actually screwing me. It didn't matter how or why. Just that it happened. I was not only thirty-six years old, over the hill, washed up and finished. I was broke.

“You're welcome to come to camp, you know.”

I looked up at the general manager, grateful for the thought. But I knew, too, it was useless. I hadn't played more than half the games from the all-star break on, sitting in a hundred different press boxes while leeches asked me about my pulled groin and I lied to them that it was getting better. It wasn't getting any worse, either. It barely existed. Apart from existing to give me a little dignity, that is.

“Is there any use?”

Maguire closed his eyes. “We had a good draft. You know that.”

“I know.”

We sat silent, the truth so obvious we could not even see how to lie around it. Finally I stood up and walked to the framed team picture, staring at myself and asked. “What do you want me to do?”