Chapter 7 Beckett
The home opener was a Thursday. My father had the whole national window. Pregame, both intermissions, postgame, desk to desk.
"Three hours of him," Auggie said. "I can get the room TVs off. I know a guy."
"You don't know a guy."
"I know a guy who knows where the remote is. In this building that's the same guy."
"Leave it," I said. He left it.
The pregame show came on at five-forty while I was taping my stick. A nineteen-year-old defenseman named Skoglund had it up loud, because nobody had told him not to.
They put a graphic up. My face from Minnesota, two years old, with a number next to it I haven't had since 2019.
Then my father. Roy Douglas at a desk was a product. Gray at the temples on purpose. Jacket a half size too good. Hands folded. He did not lean in.
"People want me to be nice about this one," he said. "I'm not going to be nice about it. That's not the job and it never was."
Somebody in the room said shut up.
"Denver did not acquire a starter tonight. Denver acquired a bridge. One year, league minimum plus change, out at the deadline. I've read a lot of those. One year at the minimum with no protection. I’ve read a lot of those. That is a team saying we’d like to be wrong about you, and we’ve kept the receipt in case we’re not. "
"Beckett," Auggie said, two stalls down. "You want me to what? I can go and…"
"It's fine."
"Now the hockey." My father turned a quarter to the left toward the analyst, who was already nodding.
"The glove is at his hip. It's been at his hip two years.
He dropped it when he got heavy and he never picked it back up.
Every shooter in this league has that on video.
They will go there tonight, and they will go there early. "
The analyst said something about compete level.
"Here's the part nobody else will say, and I'm allowed to say it, because he's mine.
" He unfolded his hands. That was the tell.
He did it when he was about to be honest at somebody.
"Beckett doesn't get angry. Some guys get angry and angry is useful.
He gets small. You won't see it on his face, that's the whole trick of him.
But if this gets away from him early he will go very quiet and very polite.
He will fold like a lawn chair. Eighteen thousand people are going to sit there thinking he looks calm. "
Skoglund got up and turned it off. Nobody told him to. He stood there with his hand still on the wall like a kid who'd knocked a glass over.
"Sorry," he said, to the room.
"You're good," I said.
A few seconds of nothing.
"Well," Auggie said. "I feel loose. Does anybody else feel loose? I feel incredible."
Vegas came out the way Vegas comes out.
Four minutes in, a kid named Aubert took it down the right with no support and no angle. He threw a puck at the net like a coin into a fountain.
I had it the whole way. My glove came up and closed a half beat after the puck was already through it. It caught the inside of my wrist and went up over my shoulder and in.
Horn, song, eighteen thousand people making the sound of a bag being emptied.
I got my water bottle and put it back and scraped the crease, which was not maintenance. It was church.
And it was quiet in there. What came back was a man at a desk saying he will fold like a lawn chair.
The second one was worse, because it wasn't soft. It was slow. Screen at the top, tip on the way through. I was on my heels before the puck ever left the stick, because I was early. I was guessing. I was a man with opinions instead of a goalie.
Two nothing at 11:30 of the first.
Baranov did not look at me. That was a message too.
Auggie found me in the tunnel at first intermission.
"One thing, and then I'm going to go put my shins back on." He got in front of me so I had to stop. "My dad drove a bread truck for thirty-one years and he has never once told me the truth about anything. I've never needed him to. You're allowed to have a guy be wrong about you."
"He's not wrong."
"He's wrong about the lawn chair. I've watched you a hundred times. You don't fold. You get boring. It's the single most annoying quality a person can have and tonight it's going to be extremely useful."
Down the hall there was a TV on a bracket with my father's face on it and the sound off. My glove side was up in a freeze frame with a yellow circle drawn around it.
"Don't look at that," Auggie said.
"I'm looking past it."
"That's the same direction, Beckett."
It wasn't a speech. Nobody said a word to me.
I went out for the second and got down in my crease and did nothing. What came up was not a scouting report and it was not my father.
It was a piece of index card with grease all the way through it, propped against a toaster in a kitchen on the other side of town.
Low and slow. If it's boiling you're mad about something.
I breathed out. I stopped trying to get anywhere first.
Then other things came, in no order I chose. A dog's ear moving in an oxygen cage. A woman at her own front counter at a quarter to midnight eating soup out of a bowl that said World's Okayest Doctor. She stopped a few spoonfuls in, like somebody had put a hand on her back.
And I thought, that's out there right now, a few minutes east, whatever this is.
I've played eleven years and never had a useful thought in a crease. I've had that one.
Aubert came down the same side at 3:30 of the second and went glove again, because they'd been told to. I took it out of the air and held it up like a man checking a lightbulb. The building came up off the seats for the first time all night.
Then a five on three for the better part of two minutes. Three shots in a handful of seconds, and I do not remember any of them, which is how I know they were good.
Skoglund tipped one in at 14:02. Auggie got the second. He got the third with 6:41 left off his own hip. He skated by my net on the way to the bench and said, "Lawn chair!" directly into my mask.
Twenty-nine shots, twenty-seven saves, three to two.
Winning was worse. Losing let me be sad, and sad had a floor to it. A win like that had nowhere to go. I sat in a room with music on and I was supposed to be a person who was pleased.
The columnist who wrote The Peaks Bought a Used Car came and stood in front of me with a recorder. He asked if I had anything to say to my father. He left the hole and waited to see whether I would fill it. I never have.
"No," I said, and he wrote that down.
Baranov caught me in the hallway with his hands in his jacket pockets. "Second period. You were not early. Why?"
I stood there with a towel around my neck. "I don't know."
"Find out," Baranov said, and went to talk to somebody about a defenseman's ankle.
I sat in the truck in the players' lot with the engine running for a while.
Bear had been favoring the back end since Tuesday. He was short-striding on the left going up the stairs. Twice he'd sat down on the way to the door, which he did not do. I was allowed to be concerned about an arthritic dog.
It was eleven forty at night.
I drove to the house first. I went home and put him in the truck. Then I drove east on Thirty-Eighth and south on Federal. The whole way I was building a sentence about his gait.
The clinic lights were on. They should not have been, not the lobby ones.
The lot was empty except for her car and the security light over the runs.
Through the glass I could see her behind the front desk, sitting perfectly still with her chin in her hand.
Above her, up in the corner where nobody could possibly have wanted it, a nineteen-year-old television was on.
Bear stood up in the passenger seat.
"Yeah," I said. "Me too."
She got to the door before I did. She had it open before I had my hand off the truck.
"He's fine," I said. "Nobody's dying."
"Then what?"
"His back end. Since Tuesday."
She looked at me for about three seconds. "Bring him in."
She was in the same scrubs she'd been in that morning. There was a dark patch on the left knee where somebody had gone through the fabric with a hose or a paw. It was dry now. Her hair was down. She'd taken it out at some point in the last hour and forgotten about it.
Bear went in ahead of us and put his nose on her hand.
She got the door with her hip and locked the deadbolt behind me. Then she stood there with her hand still on it, longer than the job required.