Personally, it was not so bad, even if the team flopped. My coming to L.A. was considered a great success, precisely as intended. Dionne had more freedom to wheel; little Goring wasn’t beat on; and much to Jack Kent Cooke’s delight, the attendance didn’t falter as badly as the team, a fact he attributed directly to my presence. No one blamed the losses on me.
But it was false and I knew it. From the day I arrived in Los Angeles I’d been obsessed with my rep, for the first time seeing directly through my own eyes rather than examining myself through my image. I was like the water spiders on Black Donald Lake. Ig and I used to find the spiders by first scanning the lake bottom for their shadows, the shadows being considerably larger than the spiders themselves. That’s the way Batterinski was. Players knew me by something larger than I was myself, and that was the rep. My stats formed the shadow, and the shadow alone spooked them. But they were not seeing me as I truly was. Not at all.
But I am not stupid. Nor was Vincent Wheeler, my New York agent since the first call to pros. The Flyers had dumped me on the last leg of my contract and L.A. would have to renegotiate, so I couldn’t have changed teams at a better time. Nor could I dare change the rep, since that was why they were buying.
Wheeler flew out and began his pitch to management. The Kings were interested in three years, offering a contract that would pay $100,000 the first year, $150,000 the next and $175,000 the third. I was all for jumping at it, having never made more than $70,000 in a year in my life, but Wheeler was convinced they’d go for five years and even more cash. Why? I don’t know. We both knew in five years I’d be in the minors, if anywhere. But he convinced me to let him try, anyway.
For three days they met at the Forum, and when Wheeler finally came out to the house it was to tell me they’d struck a compromise.
“Four years, if you collect your bonuses, $700,000.”
I knew better than to ask what the bonuses were. “Sounds good,” I said.
“Good! You’ve struck gold, man!”Vincent shouted. He was already turning California: burnt like a rash, polo shirt, open, enough neck metal to put him in traction, mirror shades. Every time I looked at him I saw myself. But he was my agent, I suppose that was proper.
“I’m telling you this is a super deal, Felix.”
“Yah, well, thanks.”
Vincent smiled, seeming to pull harder on the left side to show off the gold cap on the eye tooth. “Not me, you did it.”
“You negotiated.”
“You were my trump card.”
I was bored already. But Vincent showed no signs of leaving. Torchy had gone up to San Francisco and didn’t plan on returning until just before camp, so Vincent suggested he might take over Torchy’s room for a couple of days and soak up the sunshine.
“You won’t like it,” I warned.
“Me? Fuck, man, I feel more ‘me’ out here than I do in New York.”
“I mean the bedroom.”
“Torchy’s? Gwan with you.”
“Go look for yourself.”
Torchy’s bedroom had an expensive pewter handle on the door rather than the customary knob, and he immediately replaced it with his own version of a “knob,” a twenty-one-inch black monster made of plastic flesh gel and advertised in the back of Cheri magazine as the “mule.”He pulled it over the pewter handle and adjusted the setting so the only way the door could be opened was if the plastic penis was moved to the erect position.
Inside, he had a trapeze over the bed, an RCA home video complete with camera, sound, videocassette capability on a special television ”sports” screen that took up most of one wall, a shelf of the latest porn movies — The Devil in Miss Jones, Deep Throat, Debbie Does Dallas, The Horizontal Secretary, several dozen more — mirrors on the ceiling, centrefolds completely covering the closet doors, an entire five-drawer dresser devoted to sexual aids, from BenWa balls to blow-up dolls you could penetrate without bursting to a box of Licketty Dick’s edible condoms, in four tantalizing flavors: mint, passion fruit, banana and of course, cherry.
“I can’t believe this shit!” Wheeler said when he saw it.
“I didn’t think you would, but I figured I’d show you anyway. You wouldn’t want to stay here.”
Vincent’s eyes bulged. “Are you kidding?”
He stayed four days. I hardly saw him. He’d come out to the pool looking like the old men we’d see in the hospital corridors when Clarkie made us go see the sick kids. He’s hobble out, blink, dive in and excuse himself, saying he must be suffering “delayed jet lag.’
And yet, between bouts in Torchy’s fantasyland, Vincent hammered out the fine details of my financial status. There would be $80,000 up front to put into the drywall business that Torchy and I and three other Kings were forming. Every month I’d get a cheque for $3,500 just to cover living expenses, and since half our time was spent on the road, that would be more than enough. Vincent had invested for me in a condominium complex out on the island — several Islanders were already in on it, he claimed — and there was also a $400,000 annuity that Vincent was purchasing through my holding company, PIM Inc., which would be paid for as the money rolled in and which would allow me to spread my tax base out over the next twenty years. At age fifty-five the annuity would begin paying me an annual dividend of roughly $50,000 a year income. All on top of my NHL Players Association pension fund, which would, all combined, make Batterinski a well-off man indeed.
But what I liked best of all was the clause in the contract that forced the Kings to lease me a brand new Corvette each and every year of the contract, with a gasoline credit card thrown in for free. The car was ready to be picked up.
And I was going home again. To show Poppa. In style.
A more sensible man would have flown Los Angeles to Toronto, Toronto to Ottawa and then rented a car and driven back up the valley. I drove all the way, air conditioner blowing full against a late August heat wave, up across the desert flats, past the Grand Canyon, through an endlessly boring Midwest of green corn, up through Detroit and onto the catatonic Highway 401. At Toronto I turned north on Highway 400 and then onto 11, one eye in the rear mirror for provincials and then quickly into the looping cutoff for Vernon. I had not been here in nearly fifteen years. Several times, back in Pomerania for Christmas or a quick visit with Poppa, I’d thought to drive over. But I hadn’t. And I wasn’t sure why.
I remembered Sugar’s place painted yellow, but it now looked baked. There was a dog now, a part-hound, part-Labrador chained to a makeshift doghouse, and she nearly ripped her throat out when I pulled into the rut that served as the driveway. A face appeared at the window, wiping at the grime. It was Willie, Sugar’s wife. Three o’clock in the afternoon and she was plastered, just as she’d usually been when she’s sat in the stands ringing that cursed cowbell for Danny and me and Powers and Cryderman and a half-dozen names I can no longer remember. She had her housecoat on, a red rose acrylic, one sleeve caught up to reveal a bone-thin left arm. In her hand she held a cigarette that shook so badly the smoke rose in small loops.
“Hello, Willie.”
“Who the hell are you?” she asked. Her voice was an old man’s, cracked and rough, the vowels thick.
“Felix. Don’t you remember me?”
She shook her head and frowned, holding the door closer to the jamb, as if I had come to rape.
“Batterinski,” I said.
She sniffed deep but continued to frown.
“I used to play for Teddy, eh?”
“Everybody used to ‘play for Teddy,’” she said angrily, imitating my own voice. “But not me, I never played anything for that no good bastard. Who are you?”
“Batterinski. I play for the Los Angeles Kings. I used to play for Philadelphia.”
“Good for you.”
“The NHL, Willie. Come on, get with it. Where’s Teddy? I wanta see him.”
“I wouldn’t know. He never tells me.”
I was losing my patience. “Any ideas?”
“He fishes down by the dam.”
Sugar had hipwaders on, their dark green streaked pink where he had used nail polish to mend tears. In the distance he looked unchanged, same stocky build, same swollen head, perhaps a bit grey now but Sugar all the same. He stood on a rock well out in the water just below the dam and was working a taut line through deep sworl, playing the current edges for rainbow. He had a roll-your-own tacked to his upper lip but not lit, and when he cast with his line and tongue, the cigarette bobbed as if it had its own strike.
I came onto him from the hill, where I could overlook the locks, the picnic area and the dam beyond. I scooped a small rock from the parking area and tossed it so it splashed just under a leaning cedar on the near shore. Sugar immediately reeled in and cast toward my splash. I threw another, this time into the pool upstream, and Sugar chased that one as well. I threw again to the tree and when Sugar’s head turned again toward the sound he suddenly thought to look up. I could see him tilt the good eye, could see anger wash across his face before recognition, but then his mouth opened and stayed open, the cigarette jigging in uncertainty. He mouthed my name, the dam drowning any sound he might have made.
I waved.
“Batterinski!”
The cigarette fell from his mouth, darting into the rocks. Sugar jumped off the rock, sinking in to his waist and slipping slightly in the current. His footing salvaged, he held his rod high and baby-walked to the cedar, where a bone-white root formed a convenient and much used banister out. I could hear him laughing.
“Here, you old bugger, let me take that.”
He handed me the rod, a shredding fibreglass model with broken lashing and a tip repaired with black hockey tape. Just as I’d expect.
Sugar stared but did not speak, nor even smile. The seventies had had no effect whatsoever on him. He still wore a thick, blunt brushcut, though it was now grey enough that his bulldog head looked wrapped in cement. He was pinker than I remembered, but this was undoubtedly because of the summer sun, and I had known him in airless, lightless arenas. His bad eye seemed clouded out completely, the useless pupil swimming aimlessly in milk. The other eye, the good eye, was wet.
“I had a dream about you.”
I laughed. “A dream?”
“Yah. You and me and some of the other lads. We was a team again, Bats.”
His eye was running. I tried to lighten things. “Here or in L.A.?”
Sugar spit on the ground. “Not here. Not there neither. I don’t know where we was. But not here. This fuckin’ town’s gone to the dogs since you were here, son.”
Son?
“Yah, well, things change, eh?”
Sugar fixed me with the eye, looking for something. “You talk different, eh?”
“Me?”
“Yah, you. Who do you think I’m talking to? Maybe I don’t always look at the right person but I talk to who I’m talking to — you! And you talk better.”
“Well thanks,” I said, concentrating on the “th” so deliberately that it almost turned into a lisp.
Sugar smiled finally, the big scarred lips rising over a vandalized graveyard of grey, broken, missing out-sized teeth. “You used to say ‘tanks,’” he said, lifting an eyebrow in reminder. I hardly needed it.
Sugar examined my clothes: new Nikes, soccer socks with blue and red rings, Adidas shorts, John Newcombe tennis shirt with flared armpits for backhands, and the moustachioed insignia winking from my heart, single shark’s tooth on a thin 14-karat gold chain.
“I’m surprised I recognized you,” he said.
I smiled, reassuring him. “I’m still the same Batterinski.”
Sugar nodded, unsure. “Well, if you are then you’re the only fuckin’ thing that hasn’t changed. You want a brew, son?”
Son again. “Sure. Where’ll we go?”
Again the smile. “Don’t have to go nowhere.”
Sugar turned, pulling off the straps and stepping awkwardly out of the hipwaders. He went to the overhanging cedar, knelt down and untied a line from the root. On the line was a burlap sack. When Sugar pulled it up, the sack spoke of cold beer and plenty.
“You’re still coaching.” I said it as a fact, though I suspected it wasn’t.
Sugar shook his head and hid behind his second beer. I waited. Finally, unable to look at me, he told the river: “I can do house league. That’s all they’ll let me touch.”
We both waited. I knew he wanted me to lead. “What happened?”
“I got burnt, that’s all.”
“How?”
“You remember Des Riley?”
“Of course I do. I lived there, remember?”
“He worked his way into the association until he got president. Then he went after me. Why I don’t know, but he was bound I wouldn’t handle the bantams no more. Passed a rule that coaches all had to pass some fuckin’ level III shit coaching courses. Had some fuckin’ four-eyed bearded sports ‘psychologist’ or some shit come up from Toronto to teach it. I refused to go.”
“So you’re out?”
“I’m out. Except house league. Such a challenge, too — I have to wait until the mothers finish tightening their skates before I bring out the chalk.”
“But you keep doing it.”
“It’s hockey. Kind of. It’s all I got.”
I finished my beer in idle talk, my mouth covering up for my thoughts. Only two coaches had ever touched me in ways I could never quite understand. One was Shero, the Fog, the man who promised we would walk together forever and led two of us straight down the garden path. The other, of course, was Sugar. To me Sugar was a far superior coach, a man who made you play your heart out for sheer love of the man and the game. Shero used an element Sugar would never resort to: fear. With Shero you always knew that a bungled pass or a half effort meant the bench or the press box until he figured your pride had been bent far enough to rebound to his advantage. Sugar worked the opposite, getting you to give your best out of sheer respect. But still, they did have much in common. Hockey was where they both lived.
All he wanted to talk about was the team from that season, where the players were and what they were doing. Tom Powers had worked his way through college on a hockey scholarship in the States and was now back in town selling cottage real estate to all the contacts he’d made at school. He even owned a trucking company, and Bucky Cryderman was delivering freight for Tom now. Sugar asked about Danny and when I told him about the mill job and Danny’s marriage to Lucy Dombrowski and the two kids, he just nodded as if he’d known all along.
“I seen you against Toronto in March.”
“National?”
“Sure. I had a good look at you, son.”
“I was thrown out in the second period.”
“I seen enough.”
Sugar said no more. I waited but he said nothing. Finally, as he knew I would, I asked.
“You saw something. What?”
“There was no reason for you to fight Lalonde.”
“He’s a goof.”
“So he’s a goof. You’re a hockey player. You played like a goof too.”
“That’s what I’m paid to do.”
Sugar nodded. “I was afraid of that.”
I looked at him. “You shouldn’t act surprised. You were the one who told me I’d only get ahead if I went with my strengths.”
“I did, yes. And I meant it too. And I think I was right. But your strength has become your weakness, son.”
“What does that mean?”
“You know better than me. Think about Teddy Roosevelt.”
The name rang a bell but only lightly. Not someone we’d played against, but something he’d said. I thought I caught it, but felt it slip and could not ask.
Sugar finished the conversation with his good eye running over my face like he was tracing a coin with a pencil. I knew I was blinking. I felt as if I understood, but if I did I could not articulate it. I stared back at him and he smiled.
“Don’t worry about
it. It had to, you see?”
No, I didn’t. Yes, I did. I didn’t know. I just knew that if Sugar thought he had seen some change and I thought I had felt some change, then there must indeed be change. Batterinski had created the rep and the rep was destroying him.
Sugar stood and gathered his beer bottles and his fishing rod. I carried the tackle box. Up on the grassy knoll, slippery from the spray, over the footbridge, past the locks and up to the car.
“I’ll give you a ride,” I said.
He pointed to the Corvette. “In that?”
“Sure.”
He shook his head. “I’ll walk.”
“It’s no problem, really.”
“I’ll walk.”
I stuck out my hand and he shook it, gripping hard with those gnarled, stubby fingers. He seemed uneasy, unsure, and then he grabbed my shoulders and buried his head into my chest. I held, but awkwardly so. I could hear cars on the highway above, and wondered if they could see. But then I felt Sugar’s hold still tightening and I realized how much more difficult it was for him than for me, and I didn’t care who saw. I held back, just as tightly.
When we broke there were tears in both of Sugar’s eyes and small drops falling off his stubbled cheeks. He tried to laugh them off but couldn’t and turned instead to pick up his tackle box. But as he reached he stopped and stood back up, now smiling.
“Still good for that ride?”
“Still good, old friend.”
Sugar nodded, calculating. “Up and down Main Street?”
“Anywhere you like,” I said.
We did both sides of Main Street twice, with Sugar shouting, screaming, laughing at every pedestrian and driver he knew or thought he might know. He leaned out and slapped the side of the Corvette like it was a pony express as we hurtled down from the theatre past the old Muskoka Hotel. He made sure there wasn’t a soul in all of Vernon who didn’t know the house-league squirt coach was being chauffeured about town by a true National Hockey League star. He wanted them all to know Ted Bowles was good enough for me, if not for them. And when I turned the corner by Riley’s hardware store, Sugar leaned as far as he could out the window and honked his nose at Des Riley, who was standing by the jackknife display watching his precious town parade before him. I goosed the car and we squealed up past the hardware store and out the Lock’s Road toward Sugar’s home and a passed-out Willie.
The Last Season Page 27