“Here he is, ladies and gentlemen, straight from Hollywood, U.S.A.” The voice had somehow remained thin as Danny had thickened.
I winced. “Cut the shit, Danny. How ya been?”
Danny surveyed his property. “Fine. Good.” He scratched his belly, lifting the jersey so a great bellybutton could smile silently through its thin beard and then vanish.
“Where're your kids?”
“Inside. You want to see them?”
Dem,
of course. As bad as Poppa. Danny asked this as if I'd come to inquire after some used tires.
“Of course I want to see them.”
I got out of the car and Danny, still smiling, looked me up and down, again scratching his great belly. “You look like a goddamn movie star, Bats.”
I smiled. “They won't let you stay in California unless you do this, did you know that?”
“Why all the jewellery? You gone fag on us, lad?”
I cuffed my own throat, as if just now aware I was wearing anything. “Ah , they all wear it. All the guys.”
“Real gold?”
“Some, yah.”
“Ugga-bugga, man. You're doing all right, Jack.”
“Yah, I guess so. Where's them kids?”
Dem.
I said it deliberately, hoping to tarnish some of the gold a bit.
“Come on. I'll get us some beer for the road.”
Danny pulled the screen door back and I noticed that the bottom portion bulged like a sail and was split all up the latch side. Danny saw me look and punched it straight. “Fuckin' kids,” he said.
“Lucy!” he shouted up the stairs. “Get down here and see who's here!”
The answer was the kids shouting and scrambling over the floor, with a woman's drill-sergeant voice ordering them back into their beds. Danny waved me forward and I followed him, thinking of my own pants and the double fitting Lou had forced on me even when I assured him they fit perfectly; Danny's jeans fell flat off his rear, bagging in and out as he walked, greyish underwear offering a two-inch trim above his belt, bisected perfectly by the top of a hairy crack that snaked slightly as he walked. He went through the hall with the lines of pegged coats and corners of boots, through the kitchen with the dishes drying in the rack, the usual triple calendars, the fading Santa that wished “Merry Christmas” to anyone who could run a thumbnail fast enough down the plastic tape hanging tongue-like from his mouth, out through a badly suspended door with an inner tube for a latch and into the back shed. The case of beer was in a corner, piled on case upon case of empties, the recent history of Danny's gut.
As he loaded up the grocery bag I looked about. The shed was as crucial to Pomeranians as the hot tub to Californians. The smell was the same as Poppa's, though Poppa had said he'd not yet been to Danny's. Coal oil and wood chips and oil and cleanser and lime and fish scales and skinned rabbit and old leather and rotting wool and musty boxes. Cables, hubcaps, licence plates, used air cleaners, empty Javex bottles, makeshift anchors, water-logged preservers and sun faded cushions, broken snowshoes, tangled fishing line and bulbless light receptacles wired into extensions with Band-aids and hockey tape. The light was not good, but I saw on the far spike Danny's old skates, the leather shanks hanging tired, dust over the boot, the blades barnacled with rust.
I pointed to them. “You ever use âem anymore?”
Danny had to follow my finger. “Skate? No way, lad.” He slapped his gut. “I'd turn the rink into ice cubes in one shift.”
I laughed, because it was easier. Danny was ashamed of his skates, ashamed of his gut. I had seen the rust; I had proof before my eyes that he no longer skates; but yet I had to ask. Could it be that I was rubbing it in?
“Hi Daddy,” a small, flat voice said from behind.
I turned. A small boy, four maybe, was standing with a tattered pink â or once pink, anyway â blanket, his other hand on the inner tube latch.
“You're supposed to be in bed,” Danny growled.
The boy said nothing. He was staring at me, looking directly at my neck and the lunacy hanging from it. He was thin and brown, with black curly hair like Danny's once was, but with a thin face and small eyes, unlike Danny. He smiled. I smiled back.
“You know who this is?” Danny said to the boy. The boy shook his head. “This here's Mr. Batterinski. You know what he does?”Another shake. “He plays hockey in the NHL. You know what that means?” Shake, no. “It means Mr. Batterinski is one of the finest athletes in the world. Now mind your manners and show Mr. Batterinski some proper respect, understand?”
The boy looked awestruck. “Hello,” he said in a voice as small as Danny's was large.
“Hi there, what's your name?”
“Tommy.”
“Hi, Tommy. I'm an old friend of your Dad's.”
Tommy said nothing. The hand came off the inner tube and into his mouth.
Danny lunged for the hand, pulling it out so quickly Tommy's mouth popped like a burst bubble. “Get that outta there!” Danny shouted. “And you keep it outta there or I'll burn that damned blanket when you're asleep, you understand?”
Tommy sniffed and nodded. He turned his gaze back to me.
“You play hockey, Tommy?” I asked.
Tommy shook his head.
“He will, he will,” Danny said. “He's a tough little squirt too. Just look at him.”
Danny scooped up his son and thrust the boy at me. When I took him, Tommy grabbed back instinctively for his father, but curiosity overcame him and he came into my arms and stared fixedly at my neck. He smelled of flannelette and dried urine. The smell of my childhood. It didn't offend me. I wanted to bury my face in his pajamas and remember, to know if I only could that the glory was all ahead rather than falling further and further behind. I breathed deep.
“Tommy! Get up here!” It was the woman's voice again, edgy, exhausted.
“He's with us!” Danny shouted back.
Danny went back into the kitchen and I followed, waiting while he looped the rubber latch tight for raccoons and porcupines. Tommy showed no eagerness to escape. He rode my arm comfortably, hanging on to my shoulder with one arm, the torn, small pink blanket with the other, and staring still at the vanity around my neck.
“Tommy!” the woman shouted. She was halfway down the stairs, leaning over the banister so she could see into the kitchen. Tommy cringed back into my arms for protection. I tightened my grip.
It was Lucy. At least I was pretty sure it was Lucy. The marvellous, churning butt that used to drive Danny and me to the point of self-mutilation had turned from cream to fat.
I could barely recognize her as the daydream I had carted around for the past fifteen years, me always trying to imagine what might have happened if I'd gone on to the majors and Lucy had stayed at her peak. I would be maybe thirty and I'm wearing my grey and silver pinstripe, an open powder-apple silk shirt, Texas handcrafted cowboy boots, gold-plated razor blade around my neck, California tan and mirror-backed aviator shades, and I'm dusting along in the silver Stingray with mag wheels, and suddenly I shoot through a time warp straight onto Pomerania's Old North Road, where I come out of a controlled drift straight toward the chewing cheeks of her pert little bum as she hums toward town. Like a lift? I say, and she recognizes me instantly, no questions asked, but it's obvious I've got it made and my face has cleared up. Before we've gone two turns down the road she's screaming at me to turn into the gravel pit, and fast....
But now, she herself had turned into the pits.
“Pet, you remember Felix Batterinski, don't you?”
“Hi, Lucy. Good to see you.”
She looked at me and smiled. Even her teeth had faded. But in her look I saw the old Lucy Dombrowski smoldering still, the embers of the fire that had soldered the image of being naked with the young, luscious Lucy forever in my mind. I felt awkward, as if this was a Saturday night Legion dance in 1963. And I could see in her eyes that she, too, was seeing the old Batterinski with the pimples and the Frankenstein haircut and the crummy clothes from out Batterinski Road. And I saw that she had known all along that my secret passion for her had been something she had been aware of always.
“You've certainly done well for yourself, Felix,” she said.
“I can't complain.”
“Great kid,” I said, indicating Tommy.
Lucy smiled, agreeing. But her voice argued. “He's supposed to be in bed.”
“I don't want to go to bed,” Tommy said, clinging closer.
I looked at him. “Would you do as your mother wants if I gave you a present?”
Tommy smiled and shut his eyes.
“Shit, you don't need to give him nothing, Bats,” Danny said. “
I'll
put him to bed so he stays.”
Danny reached for the boy but the boy burrowed into my neck. “Hey, wait,” I said, trying to laugh away the tension. “Here, I want to, okay?” I said to Danny, who shrugged. I handed Tommy to his mother and then looped the first neck chain off â the shark's tooth â and ceremoniously put it around his neck. The boy's tiny eyes bulged as he grabbed at the prize.
“Jesus Christ, man â you don't have to do that!” Danny railed.
“I had it given to me. Some fan. Let him have it, okay, from me?”
Lucy was agreeable. “What do you say Tommy?”
“Thank you,” Tommy said shyly.
“You take that thing off before you get into bed,” Danny warned, “or you'll strangle in your sleep, sure as shit, and I can't afford no funeral.”
“I will,” Tommy said.
I leaned over to chuck his chin the way Clarkie always did in the hospital visits, and Tommy surprised me by leaning out from his mother's arms and kissing my cheek. It embarrassed me and I handed him back, laughing, as if he was going to fall. The kiss was wet, at first warm then cool, and I let it dry on its own, delighting in it.
“Where are you two going?” Lucy asked.
“Out. A few beers, that's all.”
Lucy nodded.
“Drive carefully,” she said. A reflex.
“Give her shit!” Danny shouted as we moved up the hill and passed St. Martin's, cresting to the down slope â “Trucks gear down” the sign warned â that led down onto the drag flats. I double-clutched up into third and popped, the engine soaring and the rear wheels screaming blue smoke. The tachometer hit 6,500 and I slapped down into fourth gear, a tiny squeal saluting the speed of the shift. We passed over the black tire marks of the quarter-mile mark doing 110 miles an hour.
“Uggggaaa-bugggaaaa!”
Danny screeched out the window.
The air rushed in cupping my head forward, blowing my mirror shades off my hair. I placed my beer between my legs, gripping the wheel with both hands.
“Roll that up!” I shouted, but it did no good. Danny leaned out like a spaniel, eyes closed, thinning hair and thickening flesh bending back from the force, smile hanging on to his teeth so his entire face didn't rip free and go rolling down the embankment like a lost hubcap.
We pulled off the highway at the first village east along the line, parked just down from the hotel and walked up a backstreet that smelled of the desperation and vomit of closing time. There had been improvements, most obvious being the single, dripping air conditioner that had been cut into the ledge above the door with the faded
LADIES AND ESCORTS ONLY
sign. Inside, the coolant was immediately cancelled by the hundred or more sweating bodies, cigarettes, pipes and hot-air talk.
“Hey, Dans!”
“Shannon, you old fart!”
“Hi, Danny.”
“Shannon!
Over here!”
Danny returned a little smile here, a finger, a wink, a few famous Shannon grins, a half-dozen punches to eager shoulders. He moved through the room like the Pope in St. Peter's Square, and I simply trailed behind, awestruck by his popularity. Some of the faces I recognized, and a few names came easily; but though I sensed many recognized me, nothing was said. No
Batterinski, you old fart
, no
Bats, over here
.
Danny refused all offers of seats. We got our own table near the back and Danny held up four fingers and instantly a waiter with slicked back hair and a rubber apron was slapping down four draft and a small opened can of tomato juice.
“Missed you last night, Danny,” the waiter said.
“Ball practice,” Danny said.
I looked surprised, seeing Danny going down for a hot grounder and rebounding off his own stomach as the ball scooted safely between his legs.
“You
playing?”
Danny looked hurt that I would ask that way. “I'm leading the league in average, lad.”
I shook my head and looked at the waiter, expecting he, too, would be amazed; but the waiter was looking for another kind of statistic. He wanted money. I pulled out a twenty, collected my change, tipped well and we drank. I paid for the second round, the third, the fourth and gave up caring or counting on the fifth.
When the music died, which was seldom, we talked. But mostly the music poured out from the juke box as steady as draft from the taps: The Eagles, Waylon Jennings, Elton John, Conway Twitty, the Stones, even the Rovers, with the young crowd dancing eyes closed and rubbing together in the section leading toward the toilets, the oldsters centre stage, generally moving about like so many pogo sticks as they desperately sought to adapt this strange music to the polka. How different from Thighs up at Burbank, where Torchy was current, where the skinny Italians and Mexicans danced like the place was a continuous, wrap-around mirror. There were none of those here in the Opeongo Hotel. Nor were there any painted women slinking about like one foot was shorter than the other. Here, the best way to tell the men from the women was that the women generally had the hockey windbreaker on, too long in the sleeves but hiking up in the middle.
It took Danny only two drinks to start rooting around in the old ground. Nothing about me unless the story also included him. I was just about to tell him about finding Maureen the Queen when Danny's mill friends arrived, pulling up several chairs without waiting for an invitation. Two tables were pushed together and a flood followed. Like wolves, they had been waiting for the first one to risk the hooves, but now that one was in, they all wanted to feed.