Chapter 5
Emile
By the end of the first week I’ve figured out I’ve been playing it wrong.
I’ve been trying to beat him. Outwork him.
Outshine him in the net beside his until Marquette has to turn his head.
Fine. Good. I keep doing it. But it’s the long road, and it’s uphill both ways, because the man’s a machine.
Machines don’t lose their jobs to a backup making noise. And I’ve made a lot of noise.
Machines lose their jobs when somebody finally works out how they run.
I know a little about being a machine. Two years I’ve been the guy who’s always ready and never needed, the one in the clean dry pads who takes the whole warm-up and then takes a seat.
You learn to look like discipline from the outside so nobody clocks the hunger underneath.
So I’ve been faking a kind of order myself, and a faker always knows a faker.
Except when I look hard at Casimir I don’t find a faker.
I find the real thing. That’s the part that starts to worry me.
So I quit trying to break his order and I start trying to read it.
I make myself his student, which is a job I never applied for.
I get to the barn even earlier, which shouldn’t have been possible and was.
I stand in the corridor outside the equipment room with a coffee going cold in my hands, the door propped open like it always is, and I watch him set his gear without letting him catch me. And I collect things.
He touches the top corner of the shelf the moment the blocker goes down.
Two fingers. Once. A man tapping a doorframe on his way through.
Never twice. Never skipped. I watched a week of mornings and it was the same two fingers every single day.
The sameness of it stopped being funny somewhere around the fourth morning.
If the rink crew drops something loud in the middle of the sequence, he doesn’t curse, doesn’t sigh. He goes back to the top and starts the whole thing clean. Patient as rain.
He drinks water at the same points, always. Like the sequence has stations along it.
He sets the leg pads faces out. Always out.
I watched him do it a dozen mornings before I understood there’s no reason for it a coach would sign off on.
The faces don’t need to see the room. He needs them to.
It’s the kind of thing that isn’t about the gear at all, and it took me the better part of a week to let myself say that out loud.
He doesn’t hum. He doesn’t talk to himself. Where I’d fill the room, he empties it, on purpose, down to the tick of the bad light. He lives in that much quiet like a fish lives in cold water. It’s the one place he looks entirely at home, and it’s a place I’d drown.
It does not occur to him to check whether anyone’s watching. Who lives like that? When I worked it out I felt like a thief. A man who never checks if he’s watched is a man who’s decided he’s alone.
One morning he nearly catches me. I’m too close, all the way inside the room, back behind the gear cage pretending to hunt for a lost roll of tape.
He stops mid-sequence and goes still. Head up.
I’m sure I’m caught, sure he’s about to turn and find me standing there with his whole life in my hands.
He doesn’t turn. He waits. He listens, an animal working out whether the sound it heard has teeth in it.
Then he decides it doesn’t, goes back to the top, starts clean.
I stand there with my heart slamming so loud I’m amazed he can’t hear that, at least. And I understand that I didn’t want to get caught because I didn’t want him to stop.
Not the sequence. The being-let-near-it.
I keep telling myself I’m scouting. A scout wants the guy to stop.
Every time I run it back, that’s the sentence that won’t sit down.
Sowa catches me, though. Not Casimir. Sowa.
I come around the corner with my coffee going cold and he’s standing in the corridor like he grew there, arms folded, watching me the way he watches a puck whose flight he already knows.
“Fortin.”
“Coach.”
“You’re here early.”
“I’m always here early. It’s my whole thing. Ask the mop kid, he’ll vouch for me, we go back years.”
“You are here early and you are not on the ice.” He gives that room to breathe, which with Sowa is longer than a man would choose. “There is a word for a goalie who studies another goalie.”
“Preparation?”
“That is one of the words.”
“How many are there?”
“Two.” He unfolds his arms and starts past me toward the room, and stops, and does not turn around. “Be careful which one it turns into. From the outside they look the same.”
“And from the inside?”
“From the inside,” he says, “you always know.”
Then he’s gone through the door, and I stand in the corridor holding a cold coffee, being extremely careful not to run that one back.
I put all of it in the drawer with the rest of him, and the fuller the drawer gets the worse I feel, and it takes me most of the week to work out why.
There’s a name for what I’m doing, when a guy does it right.
Preparation. Every coach I’ve ever had would call it homework and hand me a gold star.
So why does it feel like reading somebody’s mail?
You don’t feel guilty about homework. You feel guilty when you’ve started to care about the guy whose life you’re taking notes on.
One night I pull his tape when the film room’s empty.
The room smells like burnt coffee and the carpet that’s been in here since before I was recruited.
I put my feet up on the chair in front and I tell myself it’s scouting, and it half is.
Every goalie studies every goalie, that’s the work, and any coach in this conference would tell you the same thing with a straight face.
You learn a man’s tells so you can be him or beat him.
So I sit in the dark and run Casimir Wrobel a full season back.
Save after save. The blue light on my face.
And I watch him make the same stop the same way until the sameness quits looking boring and starts looking like a man holding a rope with both hands so nobody notices it’s the only thing keeping the roof up.
I watch him give up a goal, one of the few he gave up all year, and I watch what he does after.
Which is nothing. Which is reset, glove up, blocker square, the exact same crouch, like the puck had never gone in.
It should look like ice water. It looks like the loneliest thing I’ve ever seen.
I stop the tape. The frame sits there on the wall, a goalie coming up out of a crouch with the light already on behind him, and I don’t advance it and I don’t rewind it, and that’s how Bruno finds me.
The door goes and I don’t jump, because jumping is an admission.
“Fortin.”
“Thibault. You live in here now?”
“I do, actually.” He comes in far enough to look at the frozen frame, and then he looks at it a while longer than a man looks at a still picture. “That’s a strange one to stop on.”
“It’s the reset.”
“I know what it is.” He doesn’t sit. He puts one hand on the back of a chair and leans his weight on it and lets the room be quiet, which is a thing big men are better at than the rest of us. “You grading him?”
“That’s the job.”
“So grade him.”
I open my mouth. Nothing comes out of it. That does not happen to me. Ask anybody who has ever tried to make it happen. And Bruno stands there and watches it happen anyway.
“Give me a scale,” I say finally. “You can’t just say grade him. Grade him against what?”
“Out of ten. Same as you’d grade anybody.”
“That’s not.”
“Yeah,” he says. “That’s what I thought.”
He knocks the doorframe on his way out, easy, no weight on it at all. “Lights, when you go.”
I sit in the blue dark with a stopped goalie on the wall and I don’t give it a number. What do you even give that? There’s no number for it.
Here’s why. I came in to scout a machine, and that’s not what I’ve got.
A machine you can take apart on the bench, learn the trick of, put back together dumber than you found it.
You can’t take apart what I saw on that tape.
There’s no trick in it. There’s only a man, and a rope, and a roof.
And the plain arithmetic that if he ever lets go with one hand the whole thing comes down on him.
I’ve spent my life wanting the net he stands in.
It never occurred to me to wonder what standing there cost the man who had it.
I catch it clean the day the power stutters.
There’s a storm sitting on the ridge all afternoon, the kind that turns the light in the barn the color of a bruise, and you can hear it lean on the roof. Long before anybody’s on the ice, the overheads hitch. Brown out. Come back. Casimir’s mid-sequence at the shelf when they go, and he stops.
The room does what a room does. “Pay the bill, Marquette,” somebody hollers down the row, and a freshman laughs a half-second too long, which is what freshmen are for, and Coop says, “That’s a sign, that’s a bad sign,” to nobody, and a D-man tells him to shut up in the fondest possible way.
Fifteen guys turned a power flicker into a bit inside four seconds.
One guy didn’t.
I’m close. Three stalls down, pretending to fuss with a stick, tape in my hands going nowhere.
I’ve got a clean line on his face. For one second, in the brown-out, before the backup lights catch, the room goes almost dark, and in the almost-dark I get the truest look at him I’ve ever gotten.
It isn’t the face of a man doing a superstition.
It isn’t the face of a guy knocking on wood.
There’s no little smile in it, none of the private embarrassment a normal man wears when he does his lucky thing.
It’s the face of a man leaning his whole weight against something that’s leaning back.
The lights come up. He breathes out, slow, through his nose.
His hands aren’t quite his own for a second and I watch him get them back.
He touches the top corner, two fingers, then starts again from the top.
By the third piece his hands have quit their small shaking.
By the end he’s sealed up tight again. I sit there with a stick across my knees and feel something in my own chest roll over and show its belly.
Voyons donc. It’s not a routine. It’s not a charm. It’s not a machine idling.
I don’t have to finish the thought. I watched it. He built himself a chapel and he goes to his knees in it before every single game, because if he doesn’t, the thing on the other side comes in. And I’ve spent a year strolling into his chapel to move the candlesticks for a laugh.
I sit with that for a while. I think about my own room, two hours from anywhere, and how I never had to build a chapel.
How I fill my quiet with cheap speakers and other people, because the quiet has never come after me with teeth.
Not one night of my life. You don’t know a thing’s a gift until you meet the guy who never got it.
I’ve wanted the net so bad it cost me sleep, sure, but that’s a want, and a want you can put down.
What lives on the other side of that wall isn’t a want.
It’s a thing that has to be knelt to, every day, forever, or it wins.
I find him after, in the tunnel, alone. Water bottle in his fist. Steam still coming off him from the skate.
The storm’s still going out past the loading doors, and you can smell it, that wet-iron smell that gets into the concrete.
Thunder rolls somewhere over the ridge, and the lights in the tunnel flicker once and hold.
I don’t have a plan. That’s new. I always have a plan.
I open my mouth to chirp him, because chirping’s the nervous system I got issued instead of the standard one. And what falls out is:
“Why bantam?”
He goes still. Not the shelf-still. A different one.
“That’s when it started. The order. Somebody told me once. Why then?” I don’t dress it up. For once in my life I don’t dress it up. I don’t put a grin on the front of it to give him somewhere soft to land. I just ask it. “What happened?”
The tunnel drips somewhere behind us. The storm mutters. He doesn’t answer right away, and I let him not answer, which is another new muscle I’m learning this week. It aches like one too.
For a second I think I’m about to get the locked box. Because it does.
Instead he looks at me. Really looks. Same as he did in the equipment room. Except this time it doesn’t slam. It stays. Open and level. It costs him, and I stand there and watch him pay. He says it flat. No pity in it anywhere, because there’s no pity anywhere in this man, not even for himself.
“The winter I stopped sleeping.”
That’s it. He doesn’t explain it, and he doesn’t have to.
This is the part that undoes me. I’ve never once in my life stopped sleeping over anything.
I sleep like I’ve never done a wrong thing in it.
And I can hear the whole story in five words anyway.
A kid. Something that came in the dark and took the sleep.
A boy who got it back one plate, one prayer, one squared glove at a time.
Who’s kept the order every day since, so the dark stays on its own side of the wall.
I’ve got no chirp for that. My whole life I’ve had a chirp for everything, one tool in the box and it fits every screw.
It doesn’t fit this. I stand there in the cold tunnel with my mouth full of nothing and I let it be nothing, because for once the true thing is that I heard him and there’s nothing to put on top of that.
“Okay,” I say.
He nods, like okay was the right thing. The only thing.
Maybe the first right thing I’ve handed him all season.
He walks off up the tunnel with his water bottle, sealed back up, his steam going with him.
I watch him go and I don’t chirp the back of him.
Not chirping the back of him is the hardest athletic feat I’ve performed all week.
I stand there in the cold with the storm going and understand I’m in trouble. I came here to take his net. What I’ve gone and done instead is find the window. And the trouble with the window is that once you’ve watched the light move behind it, you stop wanting to put a puck through the glass.
You want in.
You want in.