The Last Season

by Roy MacGregor

  I might have gone mad but for two people: Uncle Ig and Danny Shannon. Ig went everywhere with me during the day, while I took charge of Poppa’s scaled-down bait business. Together, we checked the minnow traps and looked for crayfish. We even took that stupid dog Puck with us, but stopped when he kept spooking everything we wanted. Ig was good daytime company. Agreed with everything, laughed at everything, and took his pay in Mars bars. For nighttime company, there was Danny. He’d come out with his trunk full of beer and haul me off to the bridge over Sabine Creek where we’d let bobbers and worms drift down toward the hold under the bent hemlock in the hopes a speckle might be holding in the fast water.

  “I don’t give a fuck, you know. Giving it up.”

  “What?”

  “Hockey,” Danny said. “I don’t care. I like it here, eh? All the lads is still here, except you, of course. O’Malley’s is steady.”

  “Yah.” I said half-heartedly.

  “I move to $1.60 an hour after the first.”

  “Good.”

  “That’s $76.80 a week. Take-home works out to $57.20.”

  I laughed. “You sound like you’ve spent it already.”

  “How much they pay you?” Danny sounded almost resentful.

  “Thirty a week.”

  He said nothing. Was I supposed to think $57.20 take-home for ten hours a day of hustling rack sticks around the yard was somehow better than thirty a week under the table for three practices and two games a week, money you never had to spend, either, with everything paid for, local celebrity, clippings, giggling phone calls and a chance, maybe, to become everything you ever dared dream of — was Danny really implying that?

  I said nothing. I opened two fresh beers and handed Danny one while he dropped his empty in the creek and watched it drift down past the quiet bobbers. I found I had little to say to Danny.

  If only Torchy was here. We could have talked about training camp, what an agent could and could not do for you, who I’d pick for my first fight, who he thought he’d score his first NHL goal on, what we’d say in our first “Hockey Night in Canada” between-period interview. Danny, though, he wanted to go backwards. He was nineteen years old and it was like he’d retired.

  To listen to him tell his buddies, his whole life had taken place from September to April during one long winter in Vernon. He treated our 1960–61 season together like we’d been overseas, to war, and when he talked about that time he seemed to expect everything should stop out of respect. As if to say here was all one needed to know about life and living, and Danny Shannon had seen it all.

  Night after night that summer we sat there cleaning up and polishing his past. He’d ask if I thought he was National Hockey League calibre, and naturally I would say he was and that would seem to satisfy him — for the evening. Next time we’d go over it all again. But I knew one evening we would have to talk about me. And I dreaded it.

  It came on a day when the trout were surfacing down under the hemlock, but not biting. It was an evening so calm you could hear them break surface, a soft kissing sound followed by a swallow as the river took them back it. I remember it perfectly, the clouds high pink to low purple over Black Donald Hill, the night air rushing cool out of the cedars onto the water, a bullfrog on the piling over the centre pier. I had a letter in my pocket and it was burning.

  “Shit,” I said. “I almost forgot.”

  “What?” Danny said. He turned, worried.

  I pulled out the letter like I had suddenly remembered it had been there for days. Danny grabbed it and read, quickly, quietly. Then:

  “Ugga-bugga!”

  The bullfrog went silent and the shout bounced off the high rocks on the bluff opposite the cedars. Danny read the last part aloud: “You will report to rookie camp in Peterborough, Ontario, on August 23. A room will be held under your name in the Shamrock Motor Inn until six o’clock in the evening of the 23rd, after which, if you have not appeared, this offer will appear null and void. We look forward to seeing you then. Have a good summer! Yours, in hockey, Chuck Holloway.”

  I said nothing.

  “Holy old shit!” Danny said. “You get this today?”

  I nodded.

  “You show your old man?”

  I nodded.

  “And?”

  I couldn’t contain my smile. “He’s pleased.”

  “I guess so, eh? You hear from your man? What’s his name — Wheeler?”

  “He phoned around supper. He’d already heard.”

  “And?”

  “Says nineteen, four … conditional.”

  “Meaning?”

  “I have to make the team.”

  “You will,” Danny said. “You fucking will!”

  Danny spoke with such conviction that I realized I wasn’t destined for the NHL for my sake, but for his. I had to make it to justify the myth that he had created for himself. If I failed, then he had failed worse, in Vernon. If I made the team, then he would have as well, if he’d wanted to. The Gospel according to O’Malley’s Millyard.

  A prayer was the least I could do. On Sunday, Uncle Jan and Sophia and their new baby girl came up in his Rideau 500 from Renfrew. Sophia had gone to fat, her thighs whispering nylon when she heaved about the room trying to show off the bald kid like it was too bright to let eczema hold it back. Jan at least was much the same, more interested in showing off the new Ford than the child.

  Jan’s hair was thinning like Ig’s now, but he was still a kid when it came to cars. Poppa, Ig and I had to stand for half an hour before the yawning hood while Jan took off the air filter and explained what a four-barreled carburetor meant. The baby he left entirely to Sophia, as if it was her machine to demonstrate. But now, in church, I imagined them switching roles, Jan pulling open the brat’s mouth to show where the built-in enamel would rise automatically once she hit teething gear, wrapping a fist around a calf to call attention to the rocker panels, yanking down the diaper to demonstrate the dual exhaust.

  I began to snort. Poppa poked me in the ribs. Ig began to snicker and Poppa kneed him from the prayer position. I looked over, guilty for getting Ig going, and saw not him but the wolf eyes scolding back at me from beyond a dozing Jan and pious Sophia. Batcha stared until I settled back.

  I tried sobering church thoughts. Jaja’s funeral. The war plague at the rear of the church. I thanked God and Jesus and the Holy Ghost and Our Lady of Czestochowa. I prayed with all my might that Felix Batterinski would never become like the four dead soldiers, missing in action. Never. I felt invincible. Blessed, almost. I prayed so hard my sinuses ached, and when I looked up toward the altar my eyes burst alive with tiny stars that spun around inside my skull, formed, faded and finally vanished.

  Could it have been a sign?

  Father Schula moved to the pulpit. Father Kulas was dead and Father Schula had begun to look like him, thinning out, balding, the nose rising higher than I had ever remembered. He began speaking and even his voice had become Kulas’s reedy accusation. He would speak, he told us, of the church of the Laodiceans, from the third chapter of the book of Revelations.

  I would like to have dozed off, but Poppa wouldn’t let me. Schula read from the scriptures.

  “And to the angel of the church of Laodicea, write: These things saith the Amen, the faithful and true witness, who is the beginning of the creation of God; / I know thy works, that thou art neither cold, nor hot. I would thou wert cold, or hot. / But because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold, nor hot, I will begin to spue thee out of my mouth.”

  I heard Ig giggle and saw Poppa’s knee slam into Ig’s shorter leg. Ig stopped, let a squeak go and then slumped down. I guess Ig had never made the connection between Nestlé’s Quik and the Lord before.

  One long, two short.

  “Batterinski’s Bait.”

  A laugh. “Tackle your own worm.”

  “Danny! Watcha doing?”

  “Good. You?”

  “Good. What’s up?”

  “Me ‘n�
�� Dominic ‘n’ some-a the lads from down at the mill want to have a little party for you. Supposed to be a surprise but we’re going to go all night, so maybe you should know, eh?”

  “For me?”

  “Sure. National Hockey League, eh?”

  “Not yet,” I said, laughing hollow.

  “You okay for tonight, then?”

  “Tonight? That’s kind of short notice, isn’t it?”

  “What’s the matter, you going to the opera, or something?”

  Danny’s sarcasm was hardly subtle. The Shannons always remembered Jaja’s love of Paderewski, as if listening to Chopin meant Jaja was putting on the dog or something. No one in our family ever got snotty about Danny’s wet-eyed old man sniffling about those God-awful Irish ballads, like he was pretending to be an outlaw leader hiding out in Black Donald Hill.

  “Where?”

  “I’ll pick you up.”

  I thought Torchy and Larocque could drink, but somewhere along the way I’d lost contact with what beer drinking means in Pomerania. In Sudbury you drank until you passed out and that was it. Maybe you threw up, but preferably not. In Pomerania you drank beer and more beer and rye and rum and gin and vodka and moonshine and, if necessary, aftershave, Scope, vanilla extract, antifreeze sucked through potatoes, and — in Danny’s case at least once — shoe polish strained through a white silk church shirt. You drank until you were sick, and once you were sick you were considered empty, not ill, and started all over again.

  Danny rolled in with the horn of his souped-up open Chevy blasting, causing a moan from Batcha’s room.

  “You crazy fart!” I shouted as I jumped into the car before it had even settled. I wanted him out of there. But Danny wasn’t through. Leaning out his window, he cranked up his loon call and I could see Batcha’s furious face press against the glass. She was black against the coal oil lamp beyond, but her eyes seemed like holes in the silhouette, sparking through. Poppa came and stood behind her with his braces down off his summer longjohns and, instead of shaking his fist as I might have expected, waved to Danny like he hated to see him go. I could never understand. He would have booted my butt back upstairs to bed. Danny he would have bear-hugged.

  Danny was already half-corked. He drifted out the lane and bounced through the far ditch, running his undercarriage across a large rock and back onto the road, all accompanied by “ugga-buggas!” and the loon call. Down the road he tore, the dual exhausts grumbling, the Chevy weaving and fishtailing from side to side, the summer dust rising like a rooster’s tail behind and the idiotic record player sounding like it had thrown a rod itself.

  “Slow her down!” I yelled.

  “Fuck off!” Danny shouted back. He slapped off the record player. I wanted to grab the wheel. I had a flash of horror: a big maple, by the creek, maybe, or the creek itself. Suddenly I could see the vehicle drifting, sliding effortlessly across the sand and into the tree. Just another weekend story from up the Opeongo Line from Ottawa, two nice kids drunk in a high-torqued car. Both nineteen. What a shame. Lost in action. Their whole lives before them.

  Half right. Danny was already half dead and I had no intention of going the distance with him.

  “Slow up!” I said, not loud but firmly. He did, a bit.

  “What’s wrong?” Danny’s voice would have him dropping a hanky at communion.

  “I’m not kidding, Danny. Slow down or you’ll ditch, okay?”

  Danny laughed. A wicked laugh I didn’t care for. Perhaps this was his solution. If he didn’t have enough confidence in making it and redeeming himself as a hockey player, then why not a car crash that would forever leave the question open.

  But we made it out. Danny turned east on the main highway down the far side of Black Donald Hill and onto the flatlands leading to the lakes.

  “Where are we going?” I asked.

  “I already told you. Cottage down on Black Donald.”

  “Whose?”

  “You don’t know him. I work with him.”

  “Well, what’s his name?”

  “Alvin Donovan. It’s his old man’s place.”

  “Another fucking Irish.”

  “I agree. Stupid enough to let a stinking Pole in.”

  I smiled at Danny. It felt like old times, fine.

  We sped across the drag flats with the tangled black tire curls at the start and finish of the quarter-mile mark, down past Reid’s cabins, the marina, over past the park campgrounds and the glimmering green rooftops of Poppa’s craphouses, past the Indian reservation and then down a graded road which filtered into a rocky path with grass growing high between the tire runs. The Chevy sizzled over the grass, the oil pan and rear axle occasionally clipping lightly over stone. Nearer the cottage the raspberry bushes screeched along the side panels and caught and broke in the windshield wipers, but Danny did not slow until he stopped completely. I gave the car another year at best.

  The cottage was lighted up, the yellow thinning out into the parking area where already sat an ancient Buick, a Pontiac, a Fargo half-ton and an Indian motorcycle with its headlight missing. We could hear the party as we got out: a male roar filling the night air with malice and unpredictability, the trademarks of a Pomeranian good time.

  We each carried two cases of bootleg beer, tripping over the cedar roots as we made our way to the stoop. “We should have got here earlier if we were bringing the booze,” I suggested.

  “They got booze. This here’s ours.”

  Inside they sat on kitchen chairs, chesterfields, a fold-out bed and the floor. Two I didn’t know were arm-wrestling on a handmade coffee table. I dropped my beer in the kitchen, already full of cases, a bottle opener hanging on a string from the refrigerator door handle. A transistor radio rode above, sputtering, crackling, fading in and out on the distant Ottawa country station, but no one listened.

  “Hey Bats!” Dominic shouted from the floor between the fold out and the far wall. I waved. He wobbled, a bottle of rye between his legs and a six of large Coke beside him, two already empty.

  “Congratulations, pro!”

  “So long, John Ferguson!”

  “Frankenstein lives!”

  They were all here. More Danny’s friends than they ever were mine, but all were faded memory. No one new had come to Pomerania since the turn of the century, and no one ever had the guts to wonder why. Dominic Topolski now thick and gutted, a distant memory of the tiny crybaby I once played peewee with, Lacha, Tony, other names I couldn’t keep straight. They all knew me. Back home, to their families and girls, we were probably best friends. I liked that, people lying about how well they knew you. When I first went to Vernon it had run the other way; this was simply due balance.

  Only one of the gathering seemed reluctant to claim me for his own. I knew him instantly: Donovan, the cottager. I could tell by his look of terror. Poor fool. Chinless, glasses like hydro line receptacles, he was clearly yet another of Danny Shannon’s chumps paying the price of Danny’s acknowledgement.

  Our hands filled with drink, the party drove on, and Danny moved effortlessly to centre stage. They even vacated the best chair for him. He talked the loudest, drank the fastest, swore the most. We screwed Maureen the Queen all over again, naturally, and about half a dozen other Vernon girls I’d never heard of. We had Lucy Dombrowski, Patsy Keswicki, Ruth Barkowitz and Agnes Paloski — at least until Danny remembered her brother was there and changed it magnificently into a great practical joke. Had he not been there, Danny would have had poor Agnes grunting and sucking like she breakfasted on Spanish fly. Poor Agnes, who would one day become a nun. Her cross to bear Danny’s mouth.

  Some of the guys had heard about the Billings fight and wanted me to go over it again, which I did. And then Orr. Danny kept interrupting like he’d been beside me all along, but I didn’t care. They listened to me like I was Cassius Clay just returned from whipping Sonny Liston. I could see it so plainly in their eyes. Fear. Respect. Fear and respect. The way they looked at me and the way fresh b
eer kept flying from the kitchen into my hands made me open up like I never had before. I told them about Lucille, which I swore I’d never mention to anyone, only this time she had tits like Jayne Mansfield. Who knows? Perhaps she had them sprung down like golf-ball elastic behind that formidable bra.

  By midnight Danny was having trouble getting a word in edge-wise and I noticed him slipping out the door for a leak. I thought nothing more about it until we heard the explosion.

  “What was that?” Donovan shouted as he jump to his feet. He screamed dat so loud at first I thought he was making a joke of it. It was the first we’d heard from him all night.

  We all stood slowly, scared, glancing around. No one knew what to expect: drunken Indians, the provincial cops firing a warning before they walked in with the underage drinking warrants? In a group we headed outside and turned toward the dock, just as another blast rang out over the lake, followed by a loud splash. There was a light on the dock.

  “Danny!” I called.

  “What?” There was resentment in his voice, like I had no right. It was a floating dock and I stepped carefully out onto the boardwalk, bothered by the jump of water through the spacing. The others followed, Donovan right behind me.

  “What do you think you’re doing?” Donovan yelled, near tears. Tink — I hadn’t taken him for a local. But surely they weren’t so stupid they’d moved here voluntarily.

  “Fishin’”

  “Fishin’?” Palowski shouted from the boardwalk. I could hear him and Lacha laughing.

  “Watch this,” Danny said. He leaned over with the flashlight until we could see the twisting back of a fish, a catfish, foolishly rising toward the light. It seemed to float up from the bottom the way a leaf falls in autumn, swaying as it rose. Just as it was about to break water Danny let the shotgun go again. In front of Danny the lake vanished, a hole dug and the fish gone; then the hole reformed, half of the fish shuddering spasmodically from the tail as its entrails rippled and lengthened in the turmoil of the lake.

  “You stupid bastard!” Donovan yelled. He was definitely angry. “You’ll have the cops here. I said nothing stupid, remember, Shannon.”