“He booked the plane and I had to go, eh? I’d never do it this way myself, you know. But it was out of my hands.”
Why are they always this way? If they truly live a life where all things — deadlines, pictures used, whatever faceless editor decided to cut out the important or put in the insignificant — are always beyond their control, why bother with such a life. They would have nothing if not for us. Yet they hold others responsible for everything; themselves for nothing.
“I hope you don’t mind.”
I was tempted to say nothing, but I was game star, feeling generous. “Well, you’re here. It’s your money you’re wasting.”
“It won’t be a waste, Felix.”
“I can’t give you much time,” I say. We are standing in the lobby of the Mukkulan Kesähotelli and he is begging for the interview.
“Problems?”
“I just get there early, that’s all.”
He accepts because he has no choice. “Where’ll we go?”
“You know as much about this place as I do,” I say wearily. “Anywhere you want.”
“Guy at the desk said there was an okay place called the Pizzeria Rosa or something. Can you believe it? Pizza, in Finland?”
“I’d rather just walk,” I say. Not because I would rather walk, really, but because I can’t resist being mean.
“A walk!” he says. “Super idea!”
We set off toward the three ski jumps that bow toward the arena where our season will be decided in ten hours’ time. I am glad to be walking, when I think about it, but would prefer to be alone. And I know precisely what I would do too. Straight down toward the thick, red-bricked town hall Timo pointed out on the bus ride in, straight to where the statue stands in a small square swept with black, crystallized snow from the roads. From the bus it was difficult to make out, but it seemed to be a statue of a gladiator, left arm raised in odd salute, right arm wrapped around one of those helmets you imagine Victor Mature was born wearing. But all that I could care less about. What I really like is that the statue is bare-assed naked. There is no Paavlo Nurmi to pat here in Lahti, and I forgot to go for some good luck before we left Helsinki.
We are not two friends out for a stroll. We are a stubborn ram and a sheep dog, and the dog, for all his scheming, tail-wagging and circling, knows the ram has no fear and will do as he pleases. Keening talks about the cold, the town, Finland, the flight, his hotel, how much he liked Erkki and then, warned by my snort, how he saw through the amiable facade of Erkki and knew him for the asshole he truly is. The sportswriter trying to ingratiate himself. That, not the typewriter, is the most important tool of his trade.
We turn into a coffee shop for warmth, and the note pad makes its first appearance. It is time to begin.
“Just coffee for me,” I say to his suggestion of drinks. “But you go ahead.” And he does, ordering a Koff. I can see he is clearly disappointed not to have alcohol doing part of the interview for him.
We talk for a long time, me working through three coffees, which are going to have me short-circuiting by game time, Keening matching me beer for coffee, his hand circling like a vulture as he looks for corpses to pick at. But I am tossing him bones. We discuss the make-up of Tapiola Hauki, the company’s involvement, the NHL Players’ Association’s part in getting me here, the trial of Vincent Wheeler, the years in Los Angeles, Torchy....
“I guess you heard all about him,” Keening says with a smile.
“Torchy? No, what?”
“You haven’t?” Keening acts like he thinks I’m putting him on.
“No. Is he all right?”
Again, the laugh. “I suppose. You know he’s got his own television show, eh?”
“Torchy?”
“Yah, Torchy Bender.”
“What kind of television show?”
“It’s called The Torch — It’s one of those religious talk shows for shut-ins and little old ladies. Only his guests are all athletes.”
“No!”
“Yes. I’ve seen it. I bet he’s put on fifty pounds too. And he’s got this beard that makes him look like a damned Mennonite.”
The beard I understand — the scars. The show I guess I can too. The scars. He’s willing to talk on about Torchy but I am not. Keening would never understand. He sees I am uncomfortable.
He asks me about my Stanley Cup ring and I am grateful for the change. I take it off and he tries it on; it looks like a truck tire on a Volkswagen. I grab it back and put it on quickly, laughing. He writes something down, probably pride. We leave Torchy and move through the WHA the junior years. We cover more than I thought possible and sit stirring my coffee watching faces in the small whirlpools: Gus, Sugar, Sanderson, Shack, Lafleur, Dionne, and always Orr, Orr, Orr, forever in mid-air with his hands raised in victory, his knee first to hit the ice.
“Tell me,” he says, as we head back out into the wind. “How does a hockey player prepare for something like the end of his career?”
“You can’t,” I say. “And anybody who says he does is lying. It’s like a car accident. If you could prepare for that you’d avoid it, wouldn’t you? But you never even see it coming until it hits you.”
I think of Torchy. I think of Ig.
“Not at all?”
“Not at all.”
“Does it seem to happen quickly?”
“One day you think you’ve arrived, the next day you’re gone.”
I am falling into my own mouth again. And do not like it.
“So this is a bit of a lifesaver for you, then?”
“I guess. Kind of.”
“You need the money, eh?”
“Yah.”
“But what if it doesn’t work out?”
I stop, turn on him, tilting my head into the wind.
“I just had the best season of my career.”
“But let’s say sometime down the road it stops being fun or worthwhile. What if this doesn’t work out, either?”
I tell him with my eyes as much as my tongue. “It will.”
“I’m sure it will. But is there anything you could do if you quit hockey altogether? Do you have a trade?”
Worms? Bait? Outhouse painting for the highways?
I decide to laugh it off. “Well, there’s always used cars to be sold in Renfrew.”
“Renfrew? What’s it like up there.”
“It’s God’s country.”
“Heavily Catholic?”
“Very heavy.”
Keening laughs, a touch forced. “Did you have a sense of God there watching while you played?”
I should stop but don’t. “Well, you were always told He was. But it was pretty hard to believe he had time to take out for a hockey game.”
“But they said He was?”
“They said whatever it took to keep you in line.”
“But I understood you to have been a server.”
“Who told you that?”
“Torchy. Why, are you embarrassed by it?”
Torchy — had they discussed Tracy, the accident? What else?
“No, of course I’m not. All the guys were.”
“So you were a true believer?”
“I guess.”
“Do you think He approved?’
“Who?”
“God.”
“God? Approved of me? Are you nuts?”
We have not moved. We are still stopped in the middle of the street, with Finns moving curiously around us. I move deliberately but regret it. Keening will think I am running from the point — whatever the point is.
“Well if you thought He was watching you, you must have thought He was thinking about you. So you must have wondered what he thought of what He saw.”
“Huh? I wanted him to like me. Like any kid.”
“But did you feel at all ... guilty about playing the way you did?”
I see now where the bastard’s going. “You mean violence?”
Keening backs off, pretending he, too, has just no
w seen the connection. I almost admire him. He’s got more than one move. But he cannot get around Batterinski.
“Well,” he says. “Not exactly violence. Aggression. Your style, you know. Did you ever feel you were perhaps playing too aggressively?”
“Not much.”
“What about that time in North Bay?”
The Billings fight. Torchy probably told him all about that too.
“I don’t know. Maybe.”
He laughs, catching me off guard. “It served its purpose, anyway.”
I laugh, too. “Yes, it certainly served its purpose.”
“Have you got enough?” I ask on the way back to the hotel. Keening seems hurt, but I suspect he has heard it before, just as I have heard his answer.
“Well, I’d kind of hoped I’d be able to hang around you as much as possible. You know, to pick up the textures.”
“Yah, sure. But just give me some time alone, first. I want to get prepared for the game. You know?”
He does not know at all, but he says: “Sure.”
“I’ll see you later then. Okay?”
Completely agreeable, he steps off the curb into the dark slush toward the direction of the hotel. I watch him up and around the first corner and then turn, retracing our steps until I reach the street that leads to the town hall.
There are pigeons all over the park. Someone had spread dried bread all along the shovelled paths and I presume the dumb birds have mistaken me for whatever fool is bothering to feed them, for they run at me like I am a three-day-old crust myself. I am afraid I am going to step on them. I shake a leg and they scatter, flying up like a small twister and circling onto an area in front of a bench, landing in what appears to have been strip-mined with toothpicks.
I stand staring up at the tall statue and I think of home and everything in between. I know my nostalgia is caused by the interview. But this time there are no words to trace the time and the faces whip up like the rising pigeons and do not settle. The gladiator has a flat nose like Ig’s, like the sculptor had dropped his work face first before the clay had hardened. But the eyes, the eyes are deep-drilled hollow holes and I see Batcha accusing from within. I see Batcha dying and I wonder — will Ig be there? I doubt it. If I cannot understand what happens to someone when they die, then how could someone like poor Ig ever hope to? He’d be scared. He’d arrive in heaven more frightened of it and God then he was of the half-ton ploughing across the gravel at him.
I jump up quickly, reaching onto the statue’s helmet for grip and gain a leghold on the pedestal. I reach quickly and give one quick slap to the gladiator’s bare, frozen ass.
No one has seen and it is done. We will win.
I feel full of energy, but when I skate out I find I am concentrating, and that is not me. Batterinski does not need to think when he plays hockey.
I am thinking too much of Kristiina and how she should be here. She was sorry enough for tears, I know and saw that. She promised on her soul to come to the next game if we go on. I heard that. But I am still not convinced. Her damned architectural bunch are on a three-day blitz to meet some deadline only a complete asshole like Jorma could care about. A sanctuary for battered children or some damned fool thing. Shit, if they put it up in Pomerania they’d have to add five floors and a morgue. I am thinking too much of Jorma, as well, still not convinced there is nothing there. And what I need to be thinking about is absolutely zero — my mind as clear as the next play.
I feel strange, slow, cumbersome. Methodical rather than magical. I know that this is apparent only to me. I play the position perfectly, but am useless to the team. I fail to anticipate a reversal in flow, and when the puck suddenly stops dead at our blueline, it is not me suddenly filling the empty space between it and their net with a break, but a circling winger from Lahti scooping the puck as I slide to block, the puck turning over me in slow somersaults until their centre baseballs it out of the air and it goes in off Timo’s hip. The lights go on, the arena erupts and all look accusingly at Timo, failing to see the fault is mine, alone.
“Hakkaa päälle!” Timo shouts as we exit for third period, down 3–1. Pekka shouts half-heartedly because he sees me look at him. So far not one has even earned the minimum fifty Finnmarks for a good hit.
Can Keening possibly be here in Finland to record the life of Batterinski and see but one terrible game? I am now glad Kristiina isn’t here, but she has seen me play well so many times before. As for this Keening dink, I have no sense of him having ever seen me play before. Except on television, of course, but television is as badly suited to hockey as radio is perfectly suited to baseball. If he has seen me only on television, then he has watched a game I had nothing to do with. He has had his focus delivered to him. He has watched the puck and the puck alone, and that is about as close to what a hockey game is all about as is watching a paper boat float down a stream. It shows you where it’s going, how fast, and what it is passing, but nothing of the undercurrents, the bottom structure or, for that matter, the life beneath. A player like Batterinski shows up very little on a televised game. But the true fans in the arena know he came to play.
It would not be right to leave Keening with this impression.
About halfway through the final period, with us down 3–1, Niemenranta, one of Lahti’s better goal scorers, comes up across centre, slips the puck one way around Pekka and darts through the other, running on the tiptoes of his skates and looking for a play. I catch him flush before he regains his footing and he grunts and rolls up my back and over in a complete circle, landing square again on his skates, the skates catching and sending him headfirst into the boards, where he lies twisting. The arena is silent but for a single whistle. The referee has wisely called the play dead to tend to the player.
I skate around Orr-like, staring first at the ice, then up at the clock, as if I am working out an equation. Three goals go easily into twelve minutes and twenty-seven seconds. But I know in my heart it does not go at all, that we cannot win. Still, I am at least content with my own play, at last.
“Sakko,” the referee says. Then very slowly: “You have penalty.”
Penalty? I am not sure I hear him right but he points toward the penalty box and nods sternly.
“What for?”
He crosses his fists to indicate interference.
“What?”
I cannot believe it. In twenty years I have not delivered a cleaner, harder bodycheck. It is the perfect check to go out on, the perfect moment to be remembered for: Batterinski doing what Batterinski does best. And now they are denying it happened.
I look for help. The players are still around the Lahti player, but two of them have him rising now. He favours one leg, but whether because it is broken or just because the skate blade snapped on the fall I can’t tell. Nor do I care.
“Pekka!” I shout.
He turns, John Wayne eyes raising in question.
“Pekka!” Find out what the hell’s going on here.”
Pekka skates to the referee, who takes his approach as a personal affront, backing up with his arms folded over his chest and simply shaking his head in response to Pekka’s questions. Pekka shouts at him and he shouts back, rolls back his sleeve and begins a countdown on his watch.
“He says you’ll have a match penalty if you don’t leave.”
“I’m not leaving until he explains what the fuck for,” I say. “No way that was interference.”
Pekka shouts back at him. The referee slaps his watch and signals a match penalty to me and backs to the scorer’s bench. I cannot believe it! I skate after him but he turns, shakes his head and closes his eyes, shutting down on me.
“You don’t have a fucking clue, do you?” I shout.
The eyes open and he stares at me, mouth trembling but arms folded firm.
“That was a perfectly fair check and you know it.”
“Bats! Forget it!” Pekka shouts.
“No I won’t forget it! This asshole knows sweet fuck-all about
hockey and I’m going to tell him so.”
“Go off,” Timo says, and places a glove on my shoulder.
“Fuck off!” I scream at Timo, batting his hand down.
The linesmen are in to help now. I have lost. I take one final burst toward the referee and he backs so startled that he loses his footing and falls. The area screams like a binding beltsaw. I suppose this is my fault too.
I lean into him as I pass, speaking loud enough to carry through the whistling but slowly enough that he may understand.
“You dumbfuck Finn.”
What is the use of even staying to watch this fiasco? I kick through the penalty box, snap my stick in half on the boards, and walk straight through toward the dressing room, where a fat little man in a ski jacket hurries ahead to unlock our door. I step in and kick the door shut, muffling the whistles that will not stop for the rest of the game.
Why do they call it anger? There is fury against an opponent, which is something I enjoy, and there is frustration, which I despise. Yet they call it all anger. If what I had done out there was intentional I would sag in my locker and enjoy letting the fury wash through. And by game’s end I would be as peaceful as a nun. But this, this keeps on growing. I kick and stomp and hammer my hands along the walls, but nothing works. I pick up Timo’s new shipment of sticks from Koho and break each one methodically, but it does not help. I take out one of the practice goaltender masks and spring on it with my skates until it cracks like a rifle, but not even that helps. I kick through the bathroom door, smash a skate through the toilet seat, elbow the paper dispenser off the wall, cuff out the soap, lean on the sink until it collapses with the plaster from the wall and shimmies like a jack-in-the-box.
But nothing helps. Frustration has no cure. I have done my job perfectly, as well as ever before in my career, and one single son-of-bitch has said it is all wrong. He has called me a liar. He has seen something that did not happen. He has penalized the reputation, not the man. He has wronged me, and if he were in here I would set the record right by standing on his jugular until the hollow ground worked through. And when his last air bubbled up and out the cut throat I would look down at him, blow his own whistle and give him an extra ten minutes, just so he could feel it all over again, the miserable bastard.
The Last Season Page 33