Chapter 6
Chapter six
Varga
Iwas three rules into the unofficial rookie handbook when Trier told me, with feeling, to shut up. I declined.
“Rule one. You do not talk to Pratt on the bus to the rink. Not hey or nice morning—nothing. On the way there he’s a closed door.
If you knock, you lose the hand. Coming home, he’s a person again.
The night before a home game, he sleeps on the floor, and you do not ask him about it, ever. That part’s one-A.”
“Okay,” Rafe said.
“Rule two. When the media puts you at the podium, you’ve got one job and it’s not honesty.
It’s being boring. If they ask you a real question, you give them a quote about wanting to be better and taking it one game at a time.
They write it down, and everyone goes home.
If you say something interesting, you’ll be reading about it for a week, and so will I, and it will annoy me. ”
“Okay.”
“Rule three. This one’s free. When Markel stops talking in the middle of a sentence, that’s the sentence. The quiet part is the part. Everybody waits for the end when the end already went by.” I pointed my tape roll at him. “Write that one down.”
He didn’t write it down. He looked at me for a second instead. “How many rules are there?” he asked in his prairie-flat voice.
“As many as it takes. That’s the system.” I turned, delighted, because the kid had asked a follow-up, and a follow-up meant he was holding on to what I said. “Rook, two months in, and he’s running his own investigation. The kid remembers everything.”
Two stalls down, Rook had a skate in his lap and a stone in his hand. He didn’t look up from the edge he was working on . “Leave him alone,” he said.
“I’m mentoring him.”
“You’re talking at him.”
“That’s mentoring. It’s highly worthwhile.”
He touched the stone to the steel one more time and held the blade up to the light to check it. He hadn’t looked at me once since I sat down, which was how I knew he was listening to everything.
It was the Rook and Varga Show. In the room, they thought it was friction. They thought Rook found me exhausting, and I found him slow. The two of us built a comedy bit to survive five years of sharing a locker room.
It was the only way I got to put my hands on him in the arena. I couldn’t cross the room and touch the back of his neck, or sit by him on the bench. I used my mouth instead: needled him, narrated him, and made a total production out of it. A show was allowed, but a hand wasn’t.
Across the room, Heath caught my eye and half-smiled into his elbow pad, the way he did when the Show was running well. He’d been smiling at me like that for three seasons.
Pratt sat taping his stick, not looking up at me or anyone. I could throw everything at Pratt, and it slid off him onto the floor. I’d stopped trying years ago.
“Doors in ten,” Mark said from the hall. “Let’s go.”
***
I scored in the second.
We were down by one and pressing to tie it up. I had the puck on the half-wall and lost it. A defenseman stripped me clean, and I hate getting stripped by anyone other than Rook, but that’s a different thing in a different building.
I was already mad about the play, and then I heard Rafe behind me, that big stride eating the ice.
He hunted the puck down behind their net and threw it to the front without looking.
The kid knew where I was. I’d gotten myself to the top of the crease with my stick flat on the ice, and the puck arrived exactly where it needed to.
I didn’t shoot so much as redirect it into the net.
The horn sounded. Nineteen thousand people who’d spent two periods sitting on their hands stood up all at once and roared. They loved us.
And then two hundred pounds of Saskatchewan meat hit me at full speed. Rafe grabbed me around the chest and lifted me, yelling something into my ear. The rest of the line piled on.
Somewhere in it, two thoughts hit me back to back that had nothing to do with the ice.
The kid’s just a hockey baby. He was so happy. He’d set up a goal for a guy he’d been studying for two months, and he was so excited he forgot to be polite about it.
And right behind it, before I could stop it: I was him once.
I’d been twenty once, looking up to older guys, learning how it all worked. Now, here was this baby with the bad haircut hugging me against the glass, and I was somebody’s older guy.
I knocked my glove against his helmet and steered us toward the bench before my stupid grin showed.
We won three to two. My goal held up.
***
They sat Rafe and me at the press table afterwards, under the hot lights. The kid held his water bottle with both hands like it might try to get away. It was his first post-game scrum.
“Varga, talk about the chemistry with Mikkelsen.”
“Chemistry? He’s twenty and does what I tell him. That’s our chemistry.” They laughed. “Joking. The kid knows how to see the ice.”
Somebody asked Rafe about the assist. His cheeks flushed red. “Varga was open.” It was three words. He’d done what I told him.
A guy I didn’t know, younger, with a lanyard from one site that ran lifestyle fluff about players. “Lucas, you’re one of the few veterans on this team still single. Rafe looks up to you. Any advice for him on balancing the personal side?”
It was nothing. It was a filler question, but it made the entire table tip toward me half an inch.
I gave them the grin and then the shrug. “Advice for Rafe? Call your mother. Mine’s in Minnesota, and she still finds out my plus-minus before I do.” They all laughed, light and easy, and the table tipped back. “The personal side waits. The game doesn’t. You get to the rest of it after.”
I’d said the line a hundred times in five years. It still came out clean. At least to everyone else in the room.
I went to work. “Ask the kid about his hands,” I told them. “Go ahead, ask him. They’re soft as anything. Where’d that come from, Rafe, the farm?”
A beat writer took the bait. “Rafe, those hands. Where’d you learn that?”
“Garage.”
That was it. Garage. They all waited for more, and there wasn’t anything else. I jumped back in before the silence could turn around and look at me again. “Rafe, buddy, we’ve got a big road trip coming up. Are you ready to live out of a bag for ten days, or is Mom still packing it for you?”
“I pack my own bag,” Rafe said.
He gave them nothing in that flat Saskatchewan tone. It was perfect. He was boring.
***
Heath was alone by the SUV, keys in his hand. I joined him. “Where’s the other half?”
“Kieran went back up for his phone, left it in his stall.”
“He left his phone?” I asked.
“He leaves everything.” Heath shook his head. “Phone, wallet, one skate if we’re lucky.”
“He does that because you carry his life around for him.”
“Somebody has to.”
“You enjoy it.”
Heath laughed. “Good goal,” he said.
“It was Rafe’s goal. I just stood where I was supposed to stand.”
“He found you.”
“Same thing.”
He leaned back against the door. “How’s Rook?” he asked.
Nobody asked me that. You asked Rook how Rook was, or you asked the room. It made no sense to come to me. To the room, I was the guy who found Rook slow and Rook found exhausting. How’s Rook was not a question for me.
Heath asked it as if it were.
I opened my mouth to say he’s good and caught myself.
“I don’t know,” I said.
The second I’d said it, I wanted to take it back.
I’d known how Rook was for the past five years.
Still, part of it was true. Rook told me that a reporter wanted an interview.
That wasn’t unusual, but there was something he held back.
It was always best to wait for him to come to me, but for now, there was a room inside Rook I couldn’t enter.
The serene smile left Heath’s face.
“Varga.” He pushed off the door. “If you ever need—“
“Hey.” Kieran came around the back of the SUV, holding up his phone. “Found it. It was in the stall, just like I thought. Cross pointed at it when he saw me and didn’t say a word.”
“Emergency averted,” Heath said.
Kieran turned toward me. “Hey, did you hear it’s Ansel’s birthday Sunday? They’re doing a thing at the Shedd. He gets a herring cake held together with blubber. You don’t want to know. A bunch of kids are going to sing to him.”
“The beluga,” I said.
“Yep, the beluga.”
Heath looked back at me. “Tell him I said hi.”
Him—like there was a him to tell, and Heath knew it.
***
The drive home was forty minutes, and I don’t remember thirty of them.
I exited the expressway into the ‘burbs, where nobody knew us, and that was the point. The garage door went up on the first tap. Rook fixed it without saying a word about it. He knew I’d find out when the door went up clean.
He was at the kitchen table with two plates already made up. It was leftover chicken salad from the fridge. My plate had a little extra. It always did.
“Good goal,” he said.
“Everybody keeps saying that.” I set my bag down. “It was Rafe’s goal.”
“It was your goal. Rafe got an assist. You buried it.”
I got a beer from the fridge, sat down, and ate a few bites before I said anything. He waited. Rook could out-wait a glacier.
“I saw Heath in the garage,” I said. “It made me a little late.”
“No problem.”
“He asked how you were.”
“What’d you tell him?”
“I told him I didn’t know,” I said.
Rook set his fork down on the edge of the plate.
“And then he said tell him I said hi. Him, Rook. He said him.”
Rook was quiet.
“I think Heath knows,” I said.
“Heath has always known.”
He said it in a flat, emotionless voice.
We’d spent five years hiding it. We made our cleaner sign an NDA, and we drove separate cars. Rook taught me to start lowering the garage door before I was all the way inside. He said I should assume someone was watching.
And Heath had known the whole time. Of course he had. He’d been out since high school; he knew exactly what two guys being careful looked like because he’d been one of them.
He sat with Kieran in the locker room with their rings on. Pratt introduced us to Sully when they started dating like it was nothing. The league absorbed all of them, and the world kept turning.
I set my fork down.
“Then why are we still doing this?”