The Last Season (7 page)

He was already down in the basement, picking through the cassocks for one that would show off his new snake boots to best effect.

“Well?” I asked.

Danny smiled his coolest. “Got my hand on a boob last night.”

“Whose?”

“Whose do you think!”

“Lucy's?”

Danny just smiled wider.

“You shoulda felt it,” he said.

I could feel my heart skipping. “Inside or out?” I asked.

Danny snorted. “Shit, I was
outside
last summer.”

Danny said this as if he was talking about a twelve-pounder that had been taken out of Black Donald Lake, almost as if his accomplishment should have been in the Renfrew paper, Danny standing there with a big smile and one hand on the outside of Lucy Dombrowski's fabulous boob, and the reeve, Hatkoski, in his chain of office standing there shaking Danny's other hand in recognition.

Father Schula assigned me to candles and the Gospel side, meaning I had little to do during the actual communion mass but think about Danny getting inside on Lucy. I tried taking my mind off it — staring up first at the sad, black-faced Our Lady of Czestochowa and then off to the plaster heaven-and-hell sculpture to the right, with the worried skull separating the peaceful angel above from the poor tortured bugger burning below, even thinking of Jaja's funeral — but it was no use. A slight cough from the congregation and I'd be staring out over Pomerania, each family in their named pew, the clothes deteriorating visibly the further away from the altar they sat, the round and flat faces, the dark and poorly shaven faces, the awed look of the young, the desperation of the old. They were all there, even old Sikorski and his wife with the runny eyes. She did not look at all well. I thought of the poor cat and its missing heart and wondered who would pray for it. A few dollars for the witch, a few more for the collection plate. Covering their bets.

Ah, who could say? Perhaps they'd been right in going to Batcha. I looked back down the pews and saw Ig's hair sticking up. Jozefa had done it this time and it looked almost natural, from a good distance. Ig was blowing his nose, loudly. Poppa was praying beside him, and Jozefa and Jan, Sophia….

Batcha was staring right at me!

She was kneeling but not praying. Her face was the only one turned up in the entire congregation. Father Kulas was mumbling in Latin and Father Schula and Danny were busy with the wine. Only Batcha and I were aware of anything at the moment but prayer. I could feel her wolf eyes rake. I looked away, off toward the confessional, but could not prevent myself from looking back. And she was still staring, scowling. I looked away again and shortly, a sneak peek back. Still she stared.

I coughed. I coughed again and this time my throat caught and I choked. I coughed and choked and my eyes started to water and Father Schula had to leave the wine and come over and slap me on the back and have me sit in the bishop's chair along the side, where the choir girls stared and giggled and where finally I gathered myself enough to stand back up and move back into position. But still I had to look. I glanced quickly as I could back toward the Batterinski pew, but this time she was not staring back. Her head was down and covered with her black shawl. Praying, of course. I kept fighting the thought that she was laughing. At me.

The choir and sidesmen went to work. The Dombrowski pew spilled out its contents and suddenly I was caught up in Lucy's floating twist to the communion altar. She had on a new dress, cotton, floral pink, a sheer purple scarf around her neck, a skull-fitting red hat and big winter boots. Not dressed as well as some of the Vernon girls, but as Danny had already said, you throw out the wrapping and keep the present. She looked delicious. I saw her eyes calculate as she stepped up the three stairs to the rail, a quick glance at me — nothing in it — and then a long drink of Danny, followed by a sweetly holy curtsey to the black Madonna. When she knelt and came forward, hands cupping to receive Father Schula's bread, I could see past the buttons to the white lace of her brassiere. I could almost see Danny's palm print.

At collection time Danny and I were sent to receive the take from the four sidesmen. Both of us held a huge black-felt-lined golden tray for the men to place their wooden plates on to be returned to the altar for the blessing, while Father Kulas stared to the heavens in silent thanksgiving. When we bowed I detected Danny's left hand move ever so slightly, almost imperceptibly, but not so little that I did not see the ten-dollar bill being crumpled into his fist. When Father Kulas took the trays and we returned to our positions, Danny reached inside his cassock for a hanky and safely deposited the money, replacing the hanky, after a flamboyant but definitely dry blow, into the other pocket.

“How could you?” I asked later in the basement.

“How could I resist?” he said, laughing.

“It's stealing from the church,” I said, furious with him.

“Ah, bullshit it is. How's the Pope going to miss a tenner?”

“You won't say that if you end up in hell,” I said very righteously.

“I'll tell you where Danny Shannon's going. Straight to heaven.” He kissed the bill. “This here'll take me to the Renfrew show with sweet little Lucy.”

The bill kissed for luck, he then stuffed it into his jacket pocket and kept it rammed there as we pushed through the choir stragglers, up the stairs and through the priest' line. Danny went first, and both Father Kulas and Father Schula seemed to awaken visibly when they saw who was next in line. The procession stalled completely, leaving the sidesmen, linen women and entire choir to wait and simply gawk as Danny yakked on about hockey in Vernon and lied about school and built up his chances in the big time. You'd have thought he was the Bethlehem Star himself, not a third-stringer; yet when it came to me I was welcomed, patted, shaken and yanked quickly through and out into the cold punch of the parking lot and the careful-not-to-swear shouts of men looking for booster cables. Uncle Jan had the Chevrolet waiting, purring with heat. Poppa was razzing him for letting it idle for two hours, saying it had cost him a quarter of a tank of gas, but Ig was cheering for the radio and Sophia, Jozefa and Batcha all seemed asleep.

I got stuffed in back with the women, with no one to talk to all the way back. It was a half moon and too cold for cloud. I remember how the birch stand on this side of the creek ran over the window so it made me imagine a zebra, and almost instantly I thought of bear, the shadows making me damned glad I wasn't taking this road on my feet, alone, as I had previous Christmases.

How, I wondered, could Danny have shaken hands with the priests using the very hand that had stolen from the church? Part of me felt they should have known, that they should have at least treated me with a little more of the respect I had always been careful to return. But for whatever reason they never seemed to feel comfortable around me, or me too much around them. Unlike Danny. His right hand had moved from Lucy Dombrowski's boob to the communion chalice to a dip in the collection plate to the priests' congratulations—and he probably hadn't washed it once in all that time. Me, I believed. I prayed. I was a good Catholic even if I sometimes slept in to give me strength for a Sunday game. And I always meant to do right, to respect the church and to get to heaven, where the only flaw in the paradise I envisioned was that it couldn't possibly have room for a Danny Shannon.

But there was always this thing between me and the church. Almost as if I might have something that threatened them, hiding in the same pocket Danny had stuffed his tenner into. But what, I didn't know.

My fist? Why would that bother anyone unless I made it do so?

Batcha?

“Well?” I said when Danny and I met to catch the Pembroke bus for the run back to Vernon the following Thursday.

“Well what?”

“How did it go with Lucy?”

“Okay, I guess.”

“You
guess
?” I said, bewildered. “Did you or didn't you?”

“I did,” Danny said slowly, then smiling. “But she didn't.”

“Oh, come on. How is
that
possible?”

Danny kicked the snow and continued to laugh. “Anything is possible in the back seat of a '59 Dodge.”

I could see the bus cresting the hill at St. Mark's and panicked.

“Come on. What do you mean?”

Danny turned sheepish, blushing. “She saw my bandage before I could get it off, eh?” he said very low, kicking violently at the snow.

“She wouldn't believe it was just an injury. She figured I had V.D.”

The driver eventually came back and said we couldn't sit together any longer unless I stopped laughing.

Six weeks back in Vernon and Danny proved good as his word on another matter. He quit school immediately on his sixteenth birthday, just as he'd promised, and his hockey began to go downhill as quickly as Main Street. At first I blamed it on his pool playing, but soon enough I realized the one thing he was truly practising was stealing.

Danny's favourite hit spot was the tiny smoke shop, Denton's, and some days it seemed he carried most of the store's stock in the inside of his hockey jacket. Denton's was run by a woman in a wheelchair and her half-blind mother. It never occurred to Danny that he was taking unfair advantage or that it might be something to be ashamed of. He'd march up to the tobacco sign guarding the glass door and knee the Macdonald's lassie right in the face, entering without even taking his hands from his pockets.

His specialty was the magazine rack, pretending to be deciding between
Hockey Pictorial
and
Mad
while really stuffing the inside of his coat with
Sir
and
Gent
and
Men Only
and
Sun Worshipper
. I was, admittedly, caught both ways, bothered by his gall and stealing but desperate to get my own fluttering paws on one of those magazines. He gave me a
Sun Worshipper
and I took it—receiving stolen goods, I know—and it was absolutely the last time I ever bothered with the pins in the damned
National Geographic
. Not that
Sun Worshipper
was the greatest magazine; it had too many old people, too many fat people, too many young kids and—worst of all—not a single person with nipple or pubic hair, thanks to some fuzzy, erased area you had to fill in with your imagination. But at least they weren't wearing bones through the nose.

I came out of school one cold Monday toward the end of the month and Sugar was waiting at the corner, the exhaust from his old yellow Studebaker practically making him invisible. He had to call out before I realized who it was.

“You want a ride home, Batterinski?” he asked.

“No sweat, Sugar. It's just up the hill.”

“Get in,” he growled.

I did. But first he had to get out. The passenger door wouldn't stay shut and so he'd fastened it by an inner tube running from the door handle to the steering column. I had to slide across and hoist my legs over the rubber tube and sit more like I was in a bathtub than a car. Sugar slammed his door twice and then proceeded to drive off in the opposite direction from Riley's. I said nothing. We went out the snow-covered road toward the river locks, toward where I knew Sugar lived, the shockless car waving over the road like a speedboat.

“What the hell is wrong with your buddy, Batterinski?” Sugar said, finally.

I figured Danny had been caught shoplifting and was in custody somewhere.

“Danny?”

“Yes, of course Danny. Who else? You know him best—what's wrong?”

“In what way?” I asked, unsure what Sugar was getting at.

“In all ways! Damn it! He's got as much God-given talent as Powers you know. But Powers is first-line centre and I'm one game away from benching Shannon. I swear.”

“Benching him?”

Sugar nodded. Air sucked defiantly up his nose.

“He's had some trouble in school,” I offered.

Sugar wasn't biting. “Shit, he already quit school.”

“Well, he wasn't very happy with it.”

Sugar pulled the car out of a drift, spinning the wheel like a ship captain as the Studebaker floated down along the river run.

“Is he homesick?” Sugar asked.

“I don't know.”

“What's his family like?” he asked, tilting his head to focus on me with the black eye.

“Great.”

“His dad, does he booze?”

“Mr. Shannon? Yah, he drinks a bit.”

“Heavy?”

“Well, I wouldn't like to say, but sometimes yes.”

Sugar dipped in and circled in the locks parking lot, rising back onto the road and into the blindness of his own exhaust.

“How's Shannon thought of back there?”

“He's popular,” I said. “Just like here.”

“He was star of the team, though, back there.”

“Yah. When we played bantam he was.”

“In your opinion, Batterinski,” Sugar said, “did he play better back there than here?”

“Yes.”

“I'm thinking of sending him back there,” Sugar said.

For a while we drove in silence, but I had to know. “When?”

“At the end of the season,” Sugar said. I breathed with relief.

“No use humiliating him. You don't mention this, I won't. Understood?”

“Understood,” I said.

Beyond the cemetery he pulled off and down the road leading toward the Rock Hill and the summer lookout. Then he turned down across the swamp road and up toward the arena, still not going anywhere near the direction of my ride home.

“How about you, Batterinski, you like it here?”

“Sure,” I said.

“Homesick?”

I shook my head. “Not a bit.”

Sugar smiled at this. “Good. Good. Tell me, how do you think you're doing?”

“Not as good as I'd like to.”