Chapter 8
Casimir
The controversy has a shape now. The shape has my name on one side of it and his on the other.
It lives where those things live. The student site.
The boards where people who have never stopped a puck decide who should.
Somebody set his glove save from the first week of practice next to a soft goal.
A goal I gave up the night the horn went wrong.
Cut them together. Ran them back to back.
The cut does what a cut does. It lies by leaving things out.
It leaves out the ten thousand saves that were nothing to look at. It keeps the one that was.
I do not read them. I want that on the record.
In my own head. Where it is the only record that counts.
I do not read them. Sowa reads them so I do not have to.
Then he does not tell me what they say. That is how I know what they say.
There is a kindness in it. There is a warning in it.
With Sowa the two are usually the same object. Seen from different ends.
He puts us head to head in practice now.
He calls it competition. It is competition.
Same drills. Same shooters. One net each, and the room keeps a count no one says out loud.
I can feel the count. It sits in the air of the barn like cold coming up off the concrete.
The young ones keep it without knowing they keep it.
I keep it too. I have never in my life been able to not keep a count.
Fortin beats me on a Tuesday.
A breakaway rep. A read he has no business making.
Committed early. Wrong by every book I have ever been handed.
The read is right anyway. His glove fills with a puck that should be behind him.
The young guys make a sound they do not make for me.
A short bright sound. The sound a room makes for something it did not see coming.
I beat him back on the next one. Clean. The save I have made ten thousand times. Made the same way I have always made it. The puck dies in my chest. I smother it before the rebound can become anything. The room is quiet for mine.
One drill holds all of it. A wall doing its job is not a story. A boy guessing right is a story. He is the story now. I am the thing the story is happening to.
I have spent my whole life turning myself into the easiest thing to locate on a rink. The save that lands every time in the place the save belongs. There is no font for that. There is no clip for that. There is a font for a boy who is never where you left him.
I know how this story goes. I have watched it happen to other men.
The room decides a thing before the standings do.
I can feel it in the way the young ones look at him and then look at me.
Measuring. You measure a bridge like that when you are not sure it will hold your weight anymore.
Most of them do not know they are doing it.
But a goalie learns to read a room like he reads a rush, all of it at once, the whole picture before the puck moves.
The picture this season is drawing has a boy at the front of it and me a step behind.
I tell myself the count in the barn is not real. It is real. Everything I have ever refused to look at has turned out to be real.
So I keep the order tighter. I add nothing and I remove nothing.
The two fingers on the corner. The pieces square.
The sentence finished before I step onto the ice.
It holds. I tell myself the holding is the answer.
It has been the answer since Babcia set my hands on the good plates and taught me that a squared thing keeps the dark out of a house.
Then one night I catch the thing I have spent my whole life watching for.
I am in my room. Everything on the shelf standing where it stands. The day set down piece by piece. The room holding it around me. The way the room is built to hold it. I have done everything right. Every ritual run clean. And I cannot sleep.
I lie in a complete order and I cannot sleep. After a while, lying there, I understand why.
His side is quiet.
No music. No thread of it coming through the thin place in the wall. I am waiting for it. I have been lying here in the dark. Waiting for a sound that is not mine to want. It has not come. The sequence will not close without it.
I make myself hold still and look at that, the way I would look at a shooter’s hips before he declares.
I have built him into the order. Without deciding.
Without permission. Without one ritual to mark it.
I made the low sound through the wall a station on the road to sleep.
Tonight the station is dark and the sentence will not finish.
I am a man lying awake inside a complete order because one variable did not play a song.
I understand exactly what the thing is. It is not that the order can break. I have always known the order can break. It is that a person can become part of it. That I can need a variable to complete the sequence.
A variable is a thing that leaves.
I do not sleep. In the morning I set the gear on the shelf.
My hands are not quite steady. Glove. Blocker.
My fingers on the corner. A small furious tremor in the two of them.
The ones that touch the wood. Sowa sees it.
He is the only one who would. He says nothing.
It is the kindest and the worst thing he does. Both at once. Which is his whole gift.
* * *
Marquette calls me in before practice. Sowa is in the room, which means it is real. When it is only Marquette it is scheduling. When Sowa is against the wall with his arms folded, it is the position.
“You’re my one,” Marquette says. He doesn’t waste words.
It is why he and I have never had trouble.
In a year of each other. “That’s not the question.
Depth is the question. It’s a long winter.
Longer if we’re lucky enough to earn a spring.
I’m not grinding you down to nothing to keep Fortin in a suit and a clean sweater.
” He taps the desk once with one finger.
“He earns starts. Nothing games. The odd back-to-back where I rest your legs. You stay the one. But he plays. You hearing me?”
I say the right thing. I make myself say it in a voice with nothing in it.
“He is ready.”
It is true. That is the part that sits wrong.
It would be easier if it were a lie, a lie I could set down and step around.
And I am the man who has to say it out loud, which hands him the first inch of the one thing I have held with both hands since I came to this place.
The net was the one thing that was ever fully mine.
Not the house I grew up in. Not the sleep I lost. The net.
I just told the man who signs the lineup card that the boy down the hall is ready to have a piece of it.
Sowa walks me out. In the hall, quiet, in Polish.
So the building cannot have it. He says, “The net is not the order.” Six words.
He has a way of putting a true thing down in six words.
Then walking off before you can argue it.
I do not answer him. I do not have an answer that is not a lie.
I will not hand Sowa a lie. He has never handed me one.
* * *
I find Fortin after. I do not plan to. My feet do it while the rest of me is still deciding.
He is in the equipment room, because of course he is.
Alone. His music leaking off him, as it always does.
Low. A thread of it filling the flat gray air.
He is on the bench with his gloves in his lap.
Not taping them, not checking a strap. Just sitting.
His head is down. For once there is no grin on him.
He doesn’t know yet that anyone is watching.
When Emile Fortin thinks no one is watching, his face is a quieter thing. Quieter than he lets the room have.
Then the door goes. He looks up. The grin starts to build on him out of pure reflex.
I do not let it finish.
“Stop,” I say.
“Wrobel.” He starts on something else. Something light. I do not let him have it.
“You’re getting starts. Marquette told me this morning.
I told him you were ready.” My voice comes out wrong.
I meant it flat. I have been flat my whole life.
It is not flat. “You are ready. You are going to take my net one game at a time, with my own coach’s blessing, in my last year in this building, and you are going to grin at me the whole way. Is that the plan?”
He sets the gloves down. He stands up off the bench. The grin is gone now. All the way gone. What is under it is the thing I saw in the crease. The night of the horn. The thing under the joke. He has a face under the face. And I am the one who keeps making him show it.
“That’s the job,” he says, low. “You know that’s the job, don’t you? I never lied about it. Told you the first day. Told you at the board. Lists change. What do you want me to say?”
“No.” That is the worst of it. “You never lied about anything. That’s the problem. You moved the glove and you waited to see what I would do. You didn’t hide it. You did it in the light and you watched.”
“Casimir.”
He has never said it. Not once. It has always been Wrobel.
The last name. The rivalry name. The name you use for a wall you mean to beat.
He says the first one now. Quiet. Careful.
You try a word like that in a language you are only just starting to learn.
Unsure of the weight of it in your mouth.
It lands somewhere the order does not reach.
There is no shelf for the sound of him saying it. There is no sequence that puts it back.
I should leave. The correct move is to leave. Every system I have built says leave. I built every one of them for exactly this. For the moment when the floor tips. For the moment the thing gets in.
I do not leave.
I close the distance the way weather closes it. No hurry. Nothing that could be stopped. His eyes go wide. He doesn’t step back. He never steps back. It is the maddening whole of him, that he does not step back from me. And I kiss him.
Or he kisses me. I will never be able to say which.
I have tried, lying awake. Tried to find the line in it where I decided.
There is no line. The horror lives exactly there.
So does the other thing. The thing I do not have a word for that is not a lie.
My body did the thing my body has never been allowed to do.
His hand comes up and fists in the front of my shirt and pulls.
Instead of pushing. He pulls. He pulls me flush against him.
His whole body a hot line down mine. I let him.
I open my mouth over his and I stop counting anything at all.
His lips part under mine. His breath goes ragged into me.
I get a hand into his hair and hold. The other spreads flat between his shoulder blades and drags him closer.
There is no closer. I want closer anyway.
His tongue slides against mine. Slow, then not slow.
He tastes like tea and the cold of the barn.
I make a sound into his mouth. A sound I have never let another person hear.
He answers it. He presses in until the bench catches the back of his knees.
My teeth find his bottom lip and he shudders, the whole of him, top to bottom, one long shudder against me.
His hips push into mine. Hard against hard through two layers of denim, and neither of us pulls back from it, and he says something into my mouth that is not a chirp and not a joke. It has my first name still in it.
I pull back. It costs me. Every part of me leans after him when I do it.
We are both breathing like the end of a shift.
Hard. Through the mouth. His mouth is parted and gone red.
His eyes are all pupil. His hand is still knotted in my shirt.
Holding on. Like if he lets go the room will take it back.
“Okay,” he says, and his voice has nothing left in it. “Okay. That was.” He does not finish it. He cannot. For once in his talking life. The boy has run out of the end of a sentence.
I do not help him. There is no word in the order for this. I have broken the one rule the whole order exists to keep. Which is that nothing gets in. It got in. It is standing in the equipment room with its hand in my shirt. Looking at me. Like I finally reached up and handed over the net.
I leave. This time I am the one who leaves. I make my feet do it. One and then the next. Out the door and up the tunnel. And I do not look back. Because if I look back I will not go.
The wall of the day has a hole in it the exact size of him.