Rafe
Chapter eleven
The bump-back was dead, and Coach Markel wanted us to know who killed it.
“St. Louis,” he said, tapping his tablet against the boards until we circled in. “Watch.”
He ran a clip for us. It was our bump-back, run by Colorado against St. Louis two nights ago, and it went nowhere. The weak-side defenseman didn’t chase the puck carrier at the line. He sat in the bump lane, waited, picked off the pass, and sent it the other way.
“They’ve seen it,” Coach Markel said. “Everybody’s seen it.
It’s on film, it works, and so now it’s scouted.
That’s the life cycle.” He pulled up a frozen frame.
“Here’s the good news. To take away the bump, he has to leave the middle early.
Look where he’s standing. Look at all that ice behind him. ”
“That’s my ice,” Varga said.
“It’s whoever gets there first’s ice.”
“It’s going to be my ice.”
“So tonight the bump is bait,” Coach Markel said, over him.
“You carry the wall like always. If their guy stays home, bump it back; business as usual. If he jumps the lane, and he will, because they’re proud of breaking it up, you keep the puck and cut behind him.
Don’t wait for the coaches to tell you. You’ll know before we do.
” He looked at me for a moment. “Twice through, both units. Go.”
On my second rush, Rook was the defenseman, holding a stick and a grudge, jumping the bump lane just like St. Louis would.
The door behind him stood wide open, exactly where the freeze frame said it would be.
I went through it. The next time Rook stayed home, and I bumped it to Heath without looking.
“Better,” Coach Markel said, and moved his cones.
At the bench, Trier glided in beside me. “Big game tonight,” he said.
“They’re all big.”
“This one’s bigger. My sister-in-law is driving up from Springfield, Missouri.” He grabbed a water bottle. “She’s a St. Louis fan. She married into this family knowing what I do for a living, and she wears a Steamers jersey into my building anyway. There’s a word for that.”
“Loyalty?”
“I was going to say something else.” He drank from the bottle. “You’re going to score tonight, and when you do, I need you to look at section 114. Don’t wave. Just look. She’ll know.”
“I can’t promise a goal.”
“I didn’t ask for a promise. I asked for a look.” He pushed off the boards. “Peaches will watch from home. No pressure from her side. She’s a Steamers fan too, but she’s fourteen, and she doesn’t know what she’s saying.”
Varga spent the last drill complaining about a playoff series that happened before I was drafted.
“Game four,” he said to Heath. “Overtime. Kollberg played with a broken stick. He was holding half a stick, and they let the play go.”
“You’ve mentioned that,” Heath said.
“For forty seconds they let the play go. I counted. I have watched it one hundred times, and I count every time.” He looked around for a wider audience and found me.
“Rafe. You were twelve. You don’t remember.
It was the worst officiated series in the sport’s history, and I include the ones from before there were rules. ”
“There were always rules,” Rook said, skating past.
“Not for St. Louis,” Varga said, and by the time Coach Markel sent us off, half the team had heard the entire series and the other half was skating away from it at full speed.
The horn sounded, and we filed toward the gate.
Varga was still going about game four in the hallway, in the room, and in the showers.
His voice carried over the water while Heath pretended to listen.
By the time I got to the garage, I knew the old playoff series better than I knew our own power play.
He caught up with me across the parked trucks while I was loading my bag, and I braced for more Kollberg.
“Tomorrow,” he said instead. “Off day. A Hungarian church on the northwest side is having its winter fundraiser. Not my church. They adopted me my first season, and now I belong to them. It’s done; there’s no paperwork for undoing it.
There’s a hall and a folk ensemble, and after the ensemble, everybody dances.
Everybody. This is not a figure of speech.
A woman named Marta will teach you the steps whether or not you ask her to.
Two hours. Do you want to come with me?”
“Sure,” I said.
It came out before he’d finished the sentence. He stood with his gym bag hanging off one shoulder and looked at me.
“No,” he said. “I asked if you wanted to.”
“Right. Yeah.”
“That’s not an answer either.” He wasn’t loud about it.
That was the strange part. Varga did everything at full volume, and this he did quietly, in a concrete garage.
No echo. “Rafe. Simple question. Do you want to come with me to meet a bunch of middle-aged Hungarians? Not is it fine, or does it work? Not is it good for everybody? Do you want to?”
I opened my mouth to say sure again and stopped it when I felt it coming. There was nothing behind it. I held my keys.
“I don’t know,” I said.
“Exactly,” Varga said.
He didn’t explain it or add anything to it. He squeezed my shoulder once. “Ten o’clock. Wear shoes you can move in. Marta will find you.” Then he walked off between the trucks, whistling something, an errand finished.
The invitation was still standing. He hadn’t taken it back, and he hadn’t accepted my sure, so it was there, open, waiting on an answer I didn’t have.
I got into my truck and put my phone in the console. It landed crooked. I squared it to the edge.
I started the truck, checked the mirror, and backed out. When I got home, it was time for my nap, but I couldn’t fall asleep.
Everything was right. I pulled the blackout curtains, put my phone on the dresser, and set both an alarm and a backup alarm for two-thirty. It was one fifteen as I lay down, the same as every game day since September. Inside my head, I heard Varga’s question again.
Do you want to?
I slept maybe forty minutes total—in little bits and pieces. At two-thirty, the alarm went off, and I was already awake.
I was in the truck by three. I took my laps and kept my routine, stretching at the red line. A few laps with a puck followed, and then I shot twice into the net from the circle.
At the glass by our end, early fans had signs up already. There was a kid in a jersey three sizes too big holding MIKKELSEN spelled out in glitter with the second K backward. I tapped the glass by his sign on my way past, and a huge smile filled his face.
Two teenagers held a bedsheet with my number and Max inside a heart. Little sawdust flecks were glued around Max’s name.
A puck came off the boards to me and I flipped it over the glass to the glitter kid. Forty strangers around him cheered.
“You see the woman in 114?” Trier asked, skating past me.
I looked. Halfway up, dead center, a woman in a Steamers jersey had planted herself with her arms crossed in a row of our fans, daring somebody to say something.
“She got here early,” Trier said. He collected a puck and skated off.
Varga stopped beside me at the line. “You good?”
“Yeah.”
He studied me and slapped my shin with his stick blade. “Score early. I have plans for this game.”
My first shift, I carried the puck along the wall and watched their weak-side defenseman all the way up. He stayed home. So I hit the line and bumped it back to Heath, business as usual, and we cycled forty seconds of clean possession before their goalie stopped a shot under his arm.
On the bench, Coach Markel leaned down the line. “He stayed.”
“He’s watching our center, not the puck,” I said.
“He won’t all night.”
Second shift, he jumped, and I wasn’t ready for it.
I’d been watching their center. Their D turned his hips and was gone from the middle before I hit the line, the door standing wide open behind him.
I saw it half a beat late, and half a beat is everything.
His stick got a piece of the puck as I tried to cut.
It skittered off my blade into the corner, garbage, nobody’s.
“You saw it late,” Coach Markel said on the bench.
“Yeah.”
“You won’t twice.”
Third shift, their D jumped again.
This time I felt it before I saw it. His hips turned toward the bump lane, and the door swung open behind his shoulder. The bump to Heath was available. It was the play we’d run all month. Everyone in the building expected it.
No.
I kept the puck and cut inside through the space where the D used to be, and now their strong-side defenseman had a problem: choosing between me walking in with a shot or Varga driving the far post.
He chose Varga. I held the puck one beat past comfortable and shot.
It hit the far post and landed in the net.
Varga arrived at top speed and didn’t brake. We hit the glass together with him screaming something Hungarian into my visor. Heath joined us and clapped my helmet with his glove.
“Turned the scouting on its head,” Heath said, delighted.
I glanced up at section 114 on the way to the bench. Halfway up, Trier’s sister-in-law had both hands on top of her head, and the man beside her was laughing. Trier bumped my shin pads with his stick as I sat down and said nothing.
Midway through the second period, I had a two-on-one charge with Varga, and everyone in the rink knew I was passing. Varga was screaming for it. Their defenseman slid in early to take it away.
No.
I shot high glove, and it went in off the crossbar with a sound like a dropped pipe.
Two goals. “You were open,” Varga said beside me when we reached the bench, staring out at the ice. “I want you to know that I know you saw me. I have never in my life been more open.”
“Their guy was sliding in before I shot.”
He turned and looked at me for a long moment.
“He learns,” he said. “The child learns.”
Their coach burned his timeout with four minutes left in the second. Down the bench, Coach Markel studied his card. We went to the room before the third period up two, and other than one late read in the first, everything had gone right.
St. Louis remembered they were a top hockey team in the third.
They scored four minutes in on a screened point shot that nobody in our end saw, including Pratt, and then the game got tense. They hit everything that moved.
With six minutes left, Trier went to the penalty box for holding a man who was about to score. I went out to help kill it.
Forty seconds in, the puck came around the boards to me with two guys closing and our bench yelling, “Ice it.” Shorthanded, you’re allowed to fire it the length of the ice, no whistle, and nobody minds. The safe play.
Their point man was charging down to keep the puck in, and behind him was sixty feet of nothing.
No.
I slipped it past his feet, out of his reach, and now it was me and one exhausted defenseman.
The noise in the arena didn’t spike. It climbed, row by row, the lower bowl standing. The defenseman backed off. I walked in and shot. The goalie got a toe on it, and Heath put the rebound in off his shin.
I never heard the horn. I felt it, somewhere under the shaking building, with Heath yelling into my ear and his glove on my neck.
3–1. Then, with ninety seconds left and their net empty, the puck found me at center ice with nobody between me and the hat trick. Everybody saw it, and the noise started early.
Varga was streaking up the far side, banging his stick on the ice.
He was, for once, genuinely open.
I passed. He buried it and threw both arms up. Then he pointed at me with his stick, skating backward, yelling something across the ice I couldn’t hear.
The crowd laughed. Nineteen thousand people, laughing at the same joke at the same time, and both benches grinning. The game was over.
The room afterward was loud. Somebody had already clipped Varga’s celebration. Trier came by my stall with his phone held out. His sister-in-law had texted a photo of herself in the Steamers jersey with her head in her hands, and under it: tell Mikkelsen I hate him. tell him nice game.
“You’ve ruined my family,” Trier said. “Congratulations on that.”
The scrum formed in the hallway, twice the size of normal, and Deckert got the first one in. “Rafe, three points, a shorthanded play, and you gave away a hat trick. Walk us through the last one.”
“Varga was open.”
The scrum laughed. Behind me, through the door, Varga’s voice: “SAY IT LOUDER.”
“HE WAS OPEN,” I said, louder, and they laughed again.
“It’s everywhere already,” Deckert said, flipping his phone around. “The nicest guy in hockey passes up his own hat trick. It fits the story people are telling about you. Farm kid comes out, plays like this, gives the goal away. Does it feel like the city’s fallen for you a little?”
Nice had nothing to do with it. Varga was open.
“It feels like we won,” I said. “Great building tonight. Great team win.”
Boring on purpose, like Varga taught me. Somebody asked if Max had been in the building, and I said he had a shoot. I told them he’d be at the gala with me next week, and the photos snapped all at once.
Cross passed behind the scrum on his way out, listened for two seconds, and said, “He made the right reads all night.”
He wasn’t completely right. I’d missed one in the first, but Cross’s version was easier to report.
After the room emptied, I sat on the bench by my stall in my suit pants and undershirt.
Mom had sent a TV shot again, my face frozen mid-shot, her thumb in the corner, and under it: Dad says the pass was the right play. He said it twice.
Then a stack of messages from Max.
Max: THE PASS
Max: do you understand what you did. the clip is everywhere. a man five feet from a hat trick says no thank you, my friend deserves this. the sports talking heads are going to weep
Max: my phone has not stopped. three outlets want us for gala coverage now. arrivals, the step and repeat, the whole show. Mark’s going to call you tomorrow and be very excited in a calm voice
Max: also hi. nice game. I watched between takes.
The step and repeat. I didn’t know what a step and repeat was. Max would tell me where to stand, and it would be fine.
Rafe: sounds good
I put the phone away, grabbed my coat, and turned off the lights on my way out.
The truck was cold. I started it and let it warm, before pulling out of the garage and turning left toward home.
The drive home from the arena was twelve minutes long. I knew every light. Somewhere around the fourth one, the truck made a wrong turn. I let it happen.
The streets after that were smaller and darker. A guy walked a dog in a coat down the street. Soon, old brick buildings pushed up close to the sidewalk on either side.
It was almost eleven when I slowed and parked at the curb in front of Niko’s shop. The apartment above was dark, but down in the shop, behind the storefront glass, the light was on. Blinds were pulled.
I sat with my hands on the wheel.
He was up.