Free The Last Season by Roy Macgregor

was a good Catholic even if I sometimes slept in to give me strength for a Sunday game. And I always meant to do right, to respect the church and to get to heaven, where the only flaw in the paradise I envisioned was that it couldn’t possibly have room for a Danny Shannon.
    But there was always this thing between me and the church. Almost as if I might have something that threatened them, hiding in the same pocket Danny had stuffed his tenner into. But what, I didn’t know.
    My fist? Why would that bother anyone unless I made it do so?
    Batcha?
    â€œWell?” I said when Danny and I met to catch the Pembroke bus for the run back to Vernon the following Thursday.
    â€œWell what?”
    â€œHow did it go with Lucy?”
    â€œOkay, I guess.”
    â€œYou guess ?” I said, bewildered. “Did you or didn’t you?”
    â€œI did,” Danny said slowly, then smiling. “But she didn’t.”
    â€œOh, come on. How is that possible?”
    Danny kicked the snow and continued to laugh. “Anything is possible in the back seat of a ’59 Dodge.”
    I could see the bus cresting the hill at St. Mark’s and panicked.
    â€œCome on. What do you mean?”
    Danny turned sheepish, blushing. “She saw my bandage before I could get it off, eh?” he said very low, kicking violently at the snow.
    â€œShe wouldn’t believe it was just an injury. She figured I had V.D.”
    The driver eventually came back and said we couldn’t sit together any longer unless I stopped laughing.
    Six weeks back in Vernon and Danny proved good as his word on another matter. He quit school immediately on his sixteenth birthday, just as he’d promised, and his hockey began to go downhill as quickly as Main Street. At first I blamed it on his pool playing, but soon enough I realized the one thing he was truly practising was stealing.
    Danny’s favourite hit spot was the tiny smoke shop, Denton’s, and some days it seemed he carried most of the store’s stock in the inside of his hockey jacket. Denton’s was run by a woman in a wheelchair and her half-blind mother. It never occurred to Danny that he was taking unfair advantage or that it might be something to be ashamed of. He’d march up to the tobacco sign guarding the glass door and knee the Macdonald’s lassie right in the face, entering without even taking his hands from his pockets.
    His specialty was the magazine rack, pretending to be deciding between Hockey Pictorial and Mad while really stuffing the inside of his coat with Sir and Gent and Men Only and Sun Worshipper . I was, admittedly, caught both ways, bothered by his gall and stealing but desperate to get my own fluttering paws on one of those magazines. He gave me a Sun Worshipper and I took it—receiving stolen goods, I know—and it was absolutely the last time I ever bothered with the pins in the damned National Geographic . Not that Sun Worshipper was the greatest magazine; it had too many old people, too many fat people, too many young kids and—worst of all—not a single person with nipple or pubic hair, thanks to some fuzzy, erased area you had to fill in with your imagination. But at least they weren’t wearing bones through the nose.
    I came out of school one cold Monday toward the end of the month and Sugar was waiting at the corner, the exhaust from his old yellow Studebaker practically making him invisible. He had to call out before I realized who it was.
    â€œYou want a ride home, Batterinski?” he asked.
    â€œNo sweat, Sugar. It’s just up the hill.”
    â€œGet in,” he growled.
    I did. But first he had to get out. The passenger door wouldn’t stay shut and so he’d fastened it by an inner tube running from the door handle to the steering column. I had to slide across and hoist my legs over the rubber tube and sit more like I was in a bathtub than a car. Sugar slammed his door twice and