Chapter 2 Riley - Next Night, Chicago
Here's my whole thesis, and I'd been workshopping it on my linemates all season, so it was tight.
Sinclairs get their banners hung before they've done anything.
That's the system. Some kid gets born into the right living room with the right last name.
By the time he's fourteen there's a guy from a network at his midget game.
By the time he's twenty-one everybody's decided he's the best player in the country.
Then he goes ahead and is the best player in the country, and nobody stops to ask which one caused which.
And then there's guys like me from the small city of Hibbing, Minnesota.
My dad ran maintenance at the plant for twenty-two years.
I learned to skate on a pond my mom shoveled.
And the whole point of a guy like me existing is to be the correction.
That's it. That's the job. You show up at the fancy dinner and you take the thing off the table.
I had this speech ready and everything.
I got about eleven steps into the cocktail hour before it fell apart, because Nate Sinclair was standing under a chandelier across the room in a navy tie with tiny lighthouses on it.
The tie I used as an insult yesterday, to his face.
He was actually wearing it. He'd gone up to his room and put on the exact thing I'd accused him of.
And whatever went through me at that moment, it was not triumph. Triumph I could work with. This was more like the feeling you get when a guy on your line scores and you didn't even pass him the puck, you just watched, and something in you goes that's ours.
I decided not to notice that. I've got a whole system for not noticing things and it's been working great.
So I crossed the room.
"Okay," I said. "Walk me through it."
He turned. He did the thing where his face got composed a half second before he'd finished turning, like there's a guy in there who works the lights.
"Kowalski."
"The lighthouses. Are we doing a bit? Is this performance art? Do they light up? Like, when you feel something, do they come on?"
"That would require them to come on," he said.
I laughed out loud, in a fancy ballroom.
"See, that's twice now," I said. "You've done that twice. You've got a whole other guy in there and he's funny and you keep him in a box."
"I don't know what you're talking about."
"Sure." I looked him over. Gray suit, actually fitted. "How much is the suit?"
"I have no idea."
"That is the single richest thing a human being has ever said to me."
"You asked."
"I asked because I wanted to watch you say a number and I got something so much better." I took a drink. "The posture's back, by the way. You're doing the trophy-case thing again. Did somebody wind you up before you came down?"
"You have a lot of opinions about a guy you met yesterday."
"I've got a lot of opinions about guys I've never met."
And then he took a slow drink of a glass he'd been holding since I got there, and looked at me over the rim, and said, "You've had three shrimp in four minutes."
I choked.
"I've been counting," he said, dead level, like he was reading a weather report. "You do it while you're talking. It's very efficient. You should be studied."
I've been chirping people since I was seven years old.
I have made grown men in beer leagues leave the ice.
I have never once, in my life, had somebody come back at me that clean and that quiet.
I stood there in a rented ballroom at the Hobey Baker banquet with a shrimp tail in my hand thinking, oh no.
Because it kept going. It went four more rounds and he won two of them, and every single time he came back it was funnier than the last one, and he never raised his voice and he never smiled while he did it.
And somewhere in the middle of that I realized, with the room noise going and a guy from ESPN trying to get my attention over my shoulder, that this was the best conversation I'd had in my entire life.
At a rubber chicken dinner. With the walking, breathing embodiment of the entire thing I came here to fix.
The seating chart put me next to him.
I'd seen it coming the night before, upside down, over a staffer's shoulder. I stood in that ballroom and thanked whatever seating-chart god was on shift, because for once in the history of the Kowalski family, the paperwork went our way.
Dinner was chicken. He ate about a third of his. I ate all of mine and most of the bread and I was pretty sure I was going to eat something of his eventually, it was just a question of what.
Then dessert came out, and it was crème br?lée, which I had eaten exactly twice in my life, and both times at events like this one.
I finished mine in two bites.
Then I looked at his, untouched. Just sitting there, with little brown top on it, still crackled from the torch, the spoon exactly where the server set it down.
We looked at each other. I put my hand on his ramekin and slid it across the tablecloth to my spot with the smoothness of a line change and I did not break eye contact once.
He didn't say anything. He watched me pick up my spoon.
"You're not going to object," I said.
"Would it help?"
"No."
"Then no."
And I ate the man's dessert at the Hobey Baker banquet on national broadcast and filed the whole thing under rich kid manners, because that's what it was. Guys like that are raised not to make a scene.
Except there was a part of me, a small part somewhere at the back, that knew that was wrong.
They gave him the award.
He deserved it. But if someone had asked me in a room with cameras I'd have said something else.
But when they said his name I got about ten full seconds of the real thing. The class rage. The whole of course it's rich the kid with the banner, of course it was decided before we got on the plane. Ten seconds, hot and clean, and I gripped the edge of the table.
And then he got up there and started talking.
Ninety seconds. Thank you to the coaches. Thank you to his teammates, that he shares this with all of them. Thank you to his family for the sacrifices. Thank you to the trustees of the award.
It was flawless. Not one word out of place. And it was completely, absolutely empty, and the part that got me was that he knew.
There was this thing behind his eyes the entire time, this tired, patient thing, like a guy doing a card trick he's done nine thousand times, for a room, alone. He knew every word he was saying was nothing. He said them all anyway and he smiled at the end just like he had practiced.
I’ve never seen anything so lonely in my life and I had known the guy for thirty hours.
The room applauded, and then it stopped applauding. I was still going.
I clapped for probably four extra seconds all by myself in a silent ballroom, and Sinclair looked over at me from the podium, and I put my hands down and told myself it was manners.
He sat back down. Set the trophy by his water glass.
I leaned over.
"Hey," I said, close to his ear. "Trophies don't win championship games."
I meant it as a threat. I had the whole tone loaded. Iron Range, plant floor, see you Saturday.
And I heard it come out of my mouth and land as something completely different, which was a promise. It sounded like there's going to be more of you.
He turned his head a couple inches.
"No," he said. "They don't."
The dead half hour after the last award is the worst part of any banquet. Everybody's standing up but nobody's leaving. The waiters want you gone. There's a guy with a microphone thanking a bank.
I went out the service door by the kitchen.
Loading dock. It was April in Chicago, which is to say January with an attitude. Diesel smell, wet concrete, a dumpster, one bulb in a cage over the door.
Thirty seconds later the door opened again and Nate Sinclair came out and stopped when he saw me.
"There's another door," he said.
"Yeah, but it's got people behind it."
He stood there a second. Then he came and stood against the wall about four feet down from me, jacket unbuttoned, hands in his pockets, and let out a breath like a guy who'd been holding one for a day.
Neither of us said anything for a bit.
Then I said, "Your power play's broken."
He turned his head. "Excuse me?"
"Your power play is broken and everybody's too polite to tell you because you're seventh in the country, but you're seventh in the country because you have the best net-front guy in the tournament and he's cleaning up your mess."
"That's not true."
"You go one-three-one and you walk it up the same side every single time. It's the same entry, Sinclair. I could kill it with three guys and a stick."
"We change the entry."
"You change the look. You don't change the entry. You put your left defenseman up like it's coming back and it never comes back."
He came off the wall.
"Twice against Denver."
"In November when your regular guy was hurt, yeah, I know, I watched it. It was great, and then you never did it again, which tells me the coach doesn't trust it, which tells me somebody in that room's afraid of something."
He stared at me.
I didn't plan that. I just watched a lot of hockey and I didn't have an off switch.
"Who are you?" he said.
"I'm the guy who's gonna take it off you Saturday."
"You watched our November games."
"I watched everybody's November games. I don't sleep."
And then it went for forty minutes. Forty minutes on a loading dock, arguing.
He knew the '91 Forge better than I did, which made me furious, so I went at the '01 Avs.
He came back with a fourth-line center's plus-minus off the top of his head.
I said that was a garbage stat and he said it was a garbage stat that I was losing to.
I laughed so hard I had to put a hand on the wall.
He got actually loud. That guy from the podium, with the ninety perfect seconds, got loud on a loading dock about a hockey team from before either of us could walk. His hair came out of whatever it was doing. He talked with his hands.
I’ve never watched somebody take off that much in that little time.
It was electric. And I'd only ever had one thing in my life that felt like that, and it had Maddie's name on it.
Which meant that this thing, tonight, on a loading dock, with a man, if I let it have a name, came with a second word attached, one I have never said out loud about myself, ever, to anyone.
I wasn't opening that. Not the night before the biggest game of my life.
Then a catering cart came banging through the door and a guy in an apron said "sorry, guys" and rolled it past us into the alley. We both stood back, and in those two seconds we both remembered the same thing at the same time.
We were supposed to hate each other. There were literally two hundred people on the other side of that door who'd bought tickets on the assumption.
He looked at the ground. I watched him put himself back together, and it was fast. It was like a guy pulling gear on in a hurry, and it made something in my chest go sideways.
So I moved before I finished reading it.
There was a stack of cocktail napkins on top of a bus tub by the door. I grabbed one and a pen out of my jacket and wrote my number on it, big.
"Okay," I said. "Rematch hotline."
"What?"
"For when you're ready to lose an argument in real time. Instead of standing in your kitchen at two in the morning going 'well, actually, the '91 Forge.'"
"I don't have a kitchen."
"You have a kitchen, Sinclair, you just don't go in it." I stepped in and slid the napkin into his breast pocket, behind the pocket square, and my knuckle went past the silk on the way out.
One knuckle, through a layer of fabric, for a second.
I felt it all the way up my arm and into my shoulder and I stood there with my hand back at my side like an idiot.
"That's a violation," he said. "Of something."
"Take it up with your uncle Marsh."
Then the door opened and somebody said his name. He pulled his jacket straight, and he was Nate Sinclair again in about a second.
He did not take the napkin out.
He went inside with it in his pocket and I stood there for another minute in the cold, watching the door, with my knuckle still reporting in.
Back at the hotel, Dex texted.
Dex: how was enemy territory?
I sat on the end of the bed with my tie off and typed: I met Sinclair, he's not what you…
Deleted it.
Typed: okay so the Sinclair thing is weird because…
Deleted it again.
Riley: chicken was a war crime. like it had been through something
Dex: lol. get some sleep man
I put the phone on the nightstand and lay there in the dark.
The night before the biggest game of your life you're supposed to visualize. That's the whole deal. You run the forecheck, you see the reads, you put yourself in the building and let your body get used to it.
I did not do that once.
I lay there and thought about one knuckle going past silk.
And about the laugh he did on the dock, the real one, third drink in, when I got him on the fourth-line center.
The one where his head went back and his throat came up out of the collar over those stupid little lighthouses.
Nobody else in that entire building heard that laugh.
Two hundred people at that dinner and I'm the only one who got it.
I ran the diagnostic. I've run it my whole life and it always says the same thing.
Adrenaline. Big week. You're wired. Go to sleep.
And for the first time I could remember, I looked at that answer and thought: I don't think that's true.
I think my own equipment might be lying to me.
Both of us had won. Saturday night was Boston College and Minnesota Duluth for the whole thing, Sinclair against Kowalski, national television, everything on the table.
I fell asleep grinning at the ceiling like a guy who'd already won something.