“Okay then. Let’s go.”
I am glad to be in the passenger’s seat. This way, if I stare straight ahead she will not see the fat man’s work. My right eye is swollen shut. Under the small bandage on the side of it are twenty-seven stitches, nineteen inside which will dissolve, eight on the outside which will be removed in a couple of weeks. I was damned lucky. So was the team — we managed to hold on to the tie.
Twenty-seven more puts me over the two hundred mark. That’s respectable. I remember Derek Sanderson saying his father used to cut out the stitches and store them in a jar, and when he’d collected a hundred of Derek’s stitches he threw them away, saying Derek had proved himself. Not like Poppa. Every time I got a stitch he’d tell me it didn’t pay to fight. Bullshit it didn’t. Every stitch I took brought me one step closer to the National Hockey League.
“Are you in any pain?” she asks.
“No.”
“You’re awfully quiet.”
“I was just thinking.”
“About your game?”
“Feels good. Our first point.”
“You can sit there like that and say it feels good?” she says, smiling.
I half turn toward her with a smile. She is smiling back, but the difference between our two acts is so immense they should not even have the same word. I must look like a geek. Kristiina looks stunning, the sun playing through the window on her hair, the Lapland sweater all blue and red and purple and white and dazzling in the morning light, mesmerizing in what it holds.
How odd all this is. Her date, her car, her cottage, her plans. I feel weakened by it all.
“I imagine you’ve been up this road a lot,” she says.
“Yes. But I like the drive.” It is not the same, though. No loud bus this time, no laughter around you, no music — “Queen” in the rear fighting with “ABBA” in the front — and no Erkki gobbling up his fingers. This time I see the drive. I see the young boys ice-fishing as we go over a bridge. I see the skiers. I see an old man burning brush from a road clearing. He stands like Poppa, leaning over the fire as if he is chewing it out.
We pass several parked cars, people removing their equipment from the trunk and their skis stabbed into the bank on the side.
“Think you’re ready for that?” she asks.
“Sure. Why not?”
“The doctors didn’t say you couldn’t?”
“No. I’ll be playing Wednesday’s game, too. So don’t worry about me. I’m fine.”
“Great.”
“What is it, rope tow or chairlift?”
She laughs. My laugh “Cross-country, silly. Nordic. Not downhill.”
Oh my God — winter tennis!
Kristiina’s father, thank heaven, is not here. He’s pretty well my size but he must be a fairy. I am in his fishnet underwear, his yellow-and-green-checkered plus fours, his purple-braided kneesocks, his yellow corduroy waistcoat and his green fluorescent toque. Kristiina says I look smashing. I say smashed.
It is hard for me to appreciate whatever pleasure it is she takes from this sport. Kristiina’s only advice is that I pretend I’m walking like Groucho Marx, but I still slide backwards on the slightest knoll. She is far ahead of me, a flash of pure white corduroy, pink stockings and toque, a high backward kick that looks from here as if she is falling on her face, but which ends up producing a long smooth glide until her next kick. She has waxed the skis and abandoned me, which I am in a way grateful for — a true athlete hates nothing so much as instruction.
Her bottom drives me on. To get her kick she must shift it quickly and the result is a fascinating shimmer that pulls me along like a magnet. I kick and scramble and hammer my poles into the snow and her bottom stays gloriously in sight. But I am tired. For a sissy sport I feel exhausted already. I must have lost more blood than I realize. She heads up a long, twisting, pine-covered hill, climbing first sideways, then herringbone, then slamming her skis onto the trail for grip and moving straight ahead. I feel like I’d be better off carrying my skis but cannot let her see me, so I struggle on and eventually the trail flattens and comes out onto a magnificent view of the lake and surrounding hills. The snow glints harshly on the eyes. Or in my case, eye.
“Come over here!” Kristiina calls. She is just beyond the larch, on a better outcropping. I try my best to ski over gracefully and do, but am forced to stop by stabbing my poles ahead and leaning into them, and this causes me to stumble and almost fall. Kristiina laughs. Her cheeks have lost their whiteness; they seem cooked now, pink-orange like the flesh of lake trout. There is a light, delicate frost on her upper lip and chin. I would kill to thaw it with my tongue.
“It’s beautiful,” I say. I cannot say more. I have no breath.
“You can see a good part of the lake from here,” she says proudly.
“What’s it called?”
“Paijanne.”
She raises a pole and points down toward the near shore with it. “See. There’s the cabin.” I look and, from here, it looks much improved, more like an illustration in a children’s book. There is smoke rising from the fire she set and more smoke coming out of the sauna by the edge of the lake. Closer up, it is just a primitive cottage. No floor insulation, no ceiling tiles, cheap pine panelling, a musty smell. Back home it would be magnificent hunting cabin, or a poor man’s cottage.
“Our sauna waits us.”
“I need a drink.”
“A sauna first. Come on. I’ll race you back.”
She is gone, the skis whispering away from me, teasing down the rise and in through a pocket to the coverage of the pine trees. I have no choice but to chase. I push off and my skis fall into her grooves, sighing. I feel the air moving fast into my bandage, stinging.
When I get to the cabin Kristiina is nowhere in sight. Her skis stand in the snow to the side of the sauna, poles beside them with gloves hanging empty in the straps. There is now more smoke coming out of the sauna than the cottage, so I can only presume she has stoked up the fire even more. I sweat just thinking about it.
“Kristiina!”
No answer.
I put her father’s skis beside hers and take only one step, my foot breaking through the snow in those funny, long-toed boots and pitching me forward onto my elbows in the deep snow. I am glad she has not answered. I am glad she has not seen.
The sauna is divided into two sections, a small dressing room and the actual sauna, the two areas separated by a thick, unpainted birch door. The building smells of birch, hot and sweating. I check first in the dressing room and her ski clothes are all there, hanging from a large wooden peg.
“Kristiina!”
Nothing.
I am trapped. She must be able to hear me in there, but chooses not to. What I want to know is not where she is, but what she is wearing. I have brought my bathing trunks with me, expecting the sauna, but they are in my suitcase up in the cabin. Can I break in on the daughter wearing the father’s fishnet underwear?
“Kristiina!”
Nothing.
I think I hear her little laugh, but can’t be certain. I have no choice but to step out of her father’s clothes, keeping on his kinky shorts, and hope she rescues me somehow. But there is nothing. I step out and jump across the cool hallway between the two rooms and knock. No answer.
“Come on, Kristiina — are you in there?”
Laughter is my answer.
“Now, I’m coming in. All right?”
Nothing.
I push open the birch door, leaning in, but the sauna is filled with steam and my one good eye winces in the heat. I enter and the heat boots me solidly in the chest. My lungs fill and turn to fire. I expel, but the replacement air is even worse. I blink, rub my eye and look again.
Kristiina is inside, sitting on the upper ledge, her legs crossed, naked. In the air she seems partly vapourized, but it is no dream. She is dimpled with sweat, the beads running high and thick and round along her shoulders, sliding thin and long and runny down and off her
breasts. I feel like something more powerful than steam has hit my lungs. She is smiling at me, welcoming me. No, she is laughing at me, and she points to my drawers, to her father’s drawers. I turn, step out of them awkwardly, open the door and toss them across the hallway into the door of the dressing room.
“I didn’t expect you to be bashful,” she says.
“I didn’t expect you to be so naked.”
“Come on. Up, beside me.” She pats the plank beside her and I step up into a mightier blast of hot air and settle down. The air seems cooler as I sit. She shifts over, her bare skin against mine. I cannot speak. I watch instead as she picks up the wooden dipper from the bucket and splashes more water onto the rocks. It strikes like gunpowder, the steam exploding off the rocks into the air, bouncing off the roof and punching me again in the lungs.
“Enough! Enough!”
Her laugh. “You’ll get used to it.”
“I doubt that,” I say.
“It’s good for you. It’s löyly.”
“It’s what?”
“Löyly. The vapour. It’s very good for you, they say.”
“Who are they?”
“Finns. Everybody.”
“I don’t believe it.”
“You will.”
For ten minutes she continues to throw on the water. Then she tosses some liquid from a small bottle and the smell of birch intensifies. I lean back and relax, watching the sweat rolling unevenly through the hair of my chest, dashing down my belly onto my thighs and then dropping onto the planking. It feels good. My eye is giving me no trouble, and each time I breathe it is as if I am sloughing off waste, being cleansed. I feel fine.
“Had enough?” she asks.
“Just getting used to it,” I say.
“You must not stay in too long.”
“Why?”
The laugh. “You’ll die.”
“I believe it,” I say, laughing with her. “Where’s the shower?”
Again the laugh. “No shower here.”
“Well, what do we use, then? That bucket?”
She says nothing. She stands, stoops and steps down, taking my hand as she goes. The motion makes her skin shimmer, a calm lake at sunset. It is hypnotic.
She goes out into the hall, pulling me behind her, then surprises me by turning not into the dressing room but to the outside door and opening it. She steps out into sunlight sharp as a knife blade and cold that lunges as the steam did inside.
If only Danny could see me now. I’m standing starkers beside a naked goddess in the middle of a Finland forest in the middle of winter. I blink and focus in on Kristiina. She is standing less than six inches from me, smiling up happily, her big teeth white as the snow, the steam rising in clouds from the top of her perfect head. She has her eyes closed, her mouth open. No one is so dumb that they’d mistake that.
I lean into her, and even Kristiina tastes like birch. I am bewildered, but not fool enough to stop and ask why. I can taste salt and birch and feel her tongue moving, surprising me as it darts high and tickles along the ribs of my roof and then slipping quickly back inside her own mouth. I feel her pressing tightly against me, her breast flattening soft and luxurious against my lower ribs, the flat part of her stomach firm and promising against my groin.
But it is her arms that puzzle me. She seems to be pulling, forcing me down as if we are in a hockey fight and she is trying to knock me off my skates. I place my feet wider and hold fast, my mouth suddenly bubbling over with her wonderful giggle. She breaks away.
“You wanted to cool off,” she says.
She pulls and I follow, falling, pressing together as we hit the snow and the snow gives to form around us. We roll and the snow flattens and she wraps her legs suddenly completely around me and just as quickly I am wearing her and we are pounding together to form a cast of her wonderful bottom in the snow.
I open my eye to see if it is really happening and I see the snow steaming all around us, our lovemaking rising into the winter air and then vanishing.
Our own personal löyly.
“It was not just a triumph for the Montreal Canadiens when they defeated the Philadelphia Flyers in four straight games to win the Stanley Cup in 1976, it was a victory for the purists. ‘To sweep them,’ Montreal captain Serge Savard said at the time, ‘maybe we put an end to all the crap they stand for.’
No names were required. Schultz was soon gone from the Flyers, and McIlhargey, and Batterinski: new fists for old. The fall would be in the same manner that had led to the rise: the classic Greek interpretation of hubris. The fists no longer worked.
Yet Felix Batterinski was not the first tragic figure in this passion play. The first was the strange, bitter man who, in a manner of speaking, constructed Batterinski. His name was Ted Bowles, known as ‘Toilet’ to Danny Shannon and other players who despised the man. It was necessary, however, to disguise their feelings, for Ted Bowles was the Vernon midget-level coach. He was a short, ugly man who never recovered from the junior hockey accident that destroyed both his right eye and his career. He returned to Vernon, worked in maintenance at the arena and inherited the thankless job of coaching the local midgets. He coached winning teams, but his tactics were so controversial that eventually he had to be fired.
‘It was a nasty business,’ says Desmond Riley, the president of the local hockey association and, ironically, the man who boarded Felix Batterinski when he first arrived in Vernon. ‘Teddy Bowles had old-fashioned ideas and refused to change. He wouldn’t work on his Level II or Level III or, for that matter, Level I qualifications. He said pencil pushers had nothing to teach him, and he even turned down our offer to pay for the coaching courses. You can understand our situation — we had to act.’
Since Bowles’s dismissal, and subsequent death, Vernon has failed repeatedly to win another midget championship. Riley dismisses this by saying that they were too soft on Bowles’s case from the start, that he won not because of what he knew but because of who he had — read Batterinski — and that the Bowles system was so diseased by the time Batterinski left that it has yet to recover.
‘Felix came into my house a shy, good boy,’ says Riley. ‘Then Bowles got hold of him and before the year was out this … child … was leading the league in penalties, slipping in his schoolwork and getting caught drinking beer.’
‘I remember our very first practice,’ says Tom Powers, the captain of that year’s midget team and today the owner of a small local trucking company. ‘We couldn’t keep from laughing at this hick and the way he talked — “duh” for “the,” you know — and his underwear — Jesus! his underwear! It looked like someone had used it to plug up a radiator’
Batterinski bought new underwear, changed his pronunciation and determined that no one would ever laugh at him again and get away with it. Once Batterinski had moved up to junior with Sudbury, a North Bay player named Simon Billings would make that mistake and pay for it with his hockey future. That fight, Batterinski would say to me nearly twenty years later, had ‘served its purpose.’ No explanation needed.
His nickname in Sudbury during those years was ‘Frankenstein.’ Again, no explanation needed.”
— Excerpted by permission from “Batterinski’s Burden” by Matt Keening, Canada Magazine, June 1982
September 2, 1963
Sudbury, Ontario
Danny told me I’d be beating the Americans to the moon and he was right. I smelled Sudbury twenty miles before I ever saw a building. At first I thought the old lady with the two shopping bags in front of me had let go a squirter; but no, it was the stacks. When I looked out to the left I could see the smoke; the sky which all the way had been as clear as Ig’s eyes now looked like some kid had thrown a rotten squash up against it, yellow streaks heading off farther than the eye could see. Along the roadside the bush disappeared, not gradually but instantly, the spruce and rolling hills suddenly giving way to a landscape that could only be described as rusted out. Like Danny said, the moon. The Americans
were spending millions to get there; I’d found it for seven dollars and thirty-five cents.
The bus pulled into the Sudbury depot in ninety-degree heat, the air rippling above the downtown rocks. Sudbury looked like a junkyard for other towns, the dump where they unloaded everything that didn’t fit or had broken down or was too old to be of any use anymore. I figured my hockey career was over before it had even begun. The only scouts this hole had ever seen would have been looking for Indians, or the way out.
“You Batterinski?”
I turned, shocked anyone would come to meet me. Surely not a player — how could they dare let one near the bus terminal without losing him to a one-way ticket home? But this was obviously an athlete: young enough, big enough, cocky enough. He had on a Sudbury Hardrocks T-shirt, jeans, and a pair of laceless sneakers that looked like they’d just been burped out of the smelter. He had Danny Shannon’s practised smile, a bent nose and hair like a devil’s paintbrush. He was to become — forever, I once thought — my best friend on earth.
“Yah,” I said.
He stuck out his hand. I took it, slowly.
“I’m Al Bender,” he said. “‘Torchy.’ Coach sent me down to welcome you.”
“Yah.”
I couldn’t dampen him. He swooped up my duffle bag, then took my suitcase and started off, leaving me nothing to carry but the Cracked magazine I’d picked up in North Bay. I had to hurry to catch up.
He talked over his shoulder like I was in a cart he was pulling. “You’ll love it here. Never mind how it looks. You ever been here before?”
“No.”
“Most people hate it at first. It’s like they died and went to hell. But then they love it.”
“Where you from?” I asked.
“Kirkland Lake.”
“Is that right?”
“Yah. I know Dick Duff a bit.”
“Christ,” I said impressed.
“Shit, everybody knows old Duffy. Where’re you from?”
“Vernon.”
The Last Season Page 13