Chapter 16 Nate - January 2019, Chicago
We ran it like a job.
I flew Tuesday morning out of Philadelphia. He flew Tuesday afternoon out of Pittsburgh into a different terminal, and the city we landed in had a foot on it and more coming. Ball cap, no logo, collar up, glasses I did not need.
I checked in first. He came in while I was in the elevator bank pretending to read a fire notice, and he walked past me to the desk and gave the man his own name, because two people avoiding the same front desk is more interesting than two people using it.
I'd never seen him look like that, no face at all, a man returning a rental car.
We went up separately. He knocked ninety seconds after my door shut. "Well, that was the worst elevator ride of my life. Eleven floors with a family from Dubuque and a man holding a bucket of ice, and I stood there with my hands behind my back like a guy waiting on a verdict."
And I got a hand in his coat and pulled him in and kissed him with the deadbolt still open behind him.
He came in cold, snow melting in his hair and running down the back of his neck onto my wrist, and his mouth was warm and his hands were freezing and he put them straight up under my sweater on purpose, flat on my ribs, and laughed when I flinched.
"Every time."
"Every time until you stop reacting." He tipped his head and came back in, slower, one hand still spread on my ribs and going nowhere. He kissed like he played, committing about a half second before I thought he was going to. "You booked a nice one."
"I booked a normal one."
"Nate, there's a robe. It's hanging up and it's got weight to it, and there's a second one in the closet in case the first robe gets tired. Normal rooms have a towel and a threat."
Room service came twice on the first night and we did not leave the room. There were two gear bags on the floor in a city neither of us was playing in. Neither of us had brought skates and neither of us could explain the bags.
At one in the morning we had a fight about the 1991 Forge. Not a discussion. A fight, at volume, both of us sitting up in bed with the lights off, until he got up on his knees and started using a pillow as a whiteboard and I told him he was going to get us thrown out.
"Of a hotel? For hockey? Sinclair, they throw people out for the tub. Nobody in the history of hospitality has ever been removed from a building for having a strong position on a fourth line."
"For noise."
"There is a man on this floor watching a movie about a submarine at ninety decibels and you're worried about my analysis."
"Your analysis is that a fourth-line center was the most important player on that team."
"He was, and I'll tell you exactly why, and I'll use the pillow."
"He had a dozen goals."
"And every single one of them mattered, which is a distinction you would understand if you'd ever in your life had to matter with a dozen goals instead of eighty points and a haircut."
I put a pillow over his face. He kept talking through it.
At some point in the middle of the second night, rule one died.
No clause invoked, no grievance, no service stairwell.
He fell asleep on his stomach with one arm off the side of the bed, and I lay there and did not compose a single version of getting out, not even out of habit.
In the morning we woke up in the same room and neither of us mentioned it, and by the third morning we had stopped pretending we hadn't noticed.
The third day the snow got serious and we did the one reckless thing of the whole trip. He wanted a diner. He'd found it in the guidebook he claimed not to own.
"It's seven in the morning in a blizzard. There will be four people in there and all of them are eighty."
We got a booth in the back with our caps on, and a waitress in her sixties came over with two coffees nobody had ordered and looked at us the way you look at furniture. "You boys drive through that?"
"We did," Riley said, immediately. "We're driving to Green Bay."
I did not move a muscle.
"In this?"
"We've got a game Saturday." He said it with the grin all the way across, both hands flat on the table. "Beer league. It's very serious. There's a trophy and everything, it's a bowling trophy somebody re-labeled, and he plays defense and he apologizes when he hits you."
"That true?"
"It's the correct thing to do," I said. "He's never once apologized for anything, which is why nobody will play with him."
She laughed and got her pad out, and Riley Kowalski ordered breakfast for two men, out loud, in public.
"He'll do the eggs, scrambled, wheat toast, no butter, and a side of fruit if you've got it, and if you haven't he'll say it's fine and it won't be, and he'll think about it in the car.
I'll take the number four with an extra pancake and bacon. "
She went away. He sat there radiating like a space heater, doing the salt shaker, doing the jam packets, turning the menu over twice, and finally I said, "What?"
"She thinks we're teammates."
"She thinks we're two men in caps."
"She thinks we play on the same team." He leaned in over the table about four inches.
"That's the whole con. We drove here in the same car.
We're going to the same rink. We're staying in the same place because that's what a team does, and none of it is a lie except the parts that are, and I've never in my life gotten to say any of it out loud with a witness in the room. "
That afternoon the city stopped moving and we did not leave the bed for six hours with the drapes wide open on a wall of nothing. That was his doing. He pulled them all the way back eleven floors up.
"Nobody's out there. It's snow. Come here."
Every night the two of us had ever had came with a departure attached to it, and without one, it turned out neither of us wanted to hurry.
He narrated, of course.
"Okay, so, findings. One. There's a spot right here, under the jaw, about an inch back, and when I do this…"
"Riley."
"…the whole left hand goes. Watch. Watch the hand. There it goes." He propped himself up on an elbow. "Two. You hold your breath. You do. You hold it and then you let it out through your nose like a guy on a bench press, and I've been meaning to raise it for a year, and this felt like the week."
"That is not what I do."
"That's exactly what you do and I've got two seasons of tape on it." He put his mouth on my shoulder and grinned into it. "Three. If I say your…"
"Say one more word and I'll tell you what you sounded like in February," I said, into his ear, and then I said the rest of it, and that shut the operation down.
I'd worked out over a year exactly which sentences take that mouth out of service and what order they have to arrive in.
He went quiet in stages, first the words and then everything, and I ranked it higher than the Calder.
The shower afterward began as logistics and did not stay that way. He put a hand flat on the tile beside my head, and he was laughing at something, and then he wasn't, and the water went cold before either of us noticed.
On the fourth morning I came out of the bathroom at ten in a robe with my hair wet, and the room was full of gray snow-light, and Riley was at the little table by the window in yesterday's t-shirt and yesterday's shorts, one sock on and one sock half off, reading a newspaper.
He'd gone downstairs and got it, in that shirt.
He had eaten his own breakfast and was working through mine, and his coffee was at his elbow, doctored to the color of a hockey sock, with a spoon standing almost upright in it.
"You're up," he said, without looking up.
"You took my bacon."
"I took the bacon that was on the table."
"It was on my plate."
"Plates are a suggestion. They're not a deed." He turned a page. "Their box scores are terrible. Look at this. They've got the shots on goal in type you'd need a loupe for and the attendance twice the size. What does that say about a city?"
I did not answer him for a long moment, because there was no crisis in that room and no clock.
Nothing was ending in forty minutes, nobody was flying anywhere.
There was a man reading a newspaper in a shirt he had slept in, stealing food off a plate that was mine, like he had not done it a hundred times before, because there had never once been a morning where it was possible.
I was in trouble. Not the kind Marsh handled, but the other kind, where a man with a media answer for everything opens his mouth and nothing comes out. And then, one heartbeat behind it, worse and better, that I did not want anybody to fix it.
He looked up. "You've got a face on."
I sat down across from him and pulled the tray about three inches toward my side of the table. "Your paper's got a bad font."
He folded it over and hit me in the arm with it. "Eat your fruit. You asked for the fruit, in front of a stranger, and now you're going to sit there and honor it."
The safest conversation in the English language, over the wreckage of the most dangerous breakfast of my life. The dark was always deniable. Syrup at ten in the morning was testimony.
Saturday the world came back and its name was San Jose.
The league flew us in, put lanyards on us, and for three days we belonged to a sponsor. The skills night had a gala attached: a few hundred people, a step-and-repeat, and a silent auction with a signed guitar in it.
Dinner had place cards, which meant somebody had made decisions.
Mine put me between a beverage executive and a composed dark-haired woman named Caroline who asked good questions and did not press any of them, and who I gathered, from the way the table handled her, was somebody's daughter.
I gave her my short answers, she laughed in the right places, a photographer worked the tables the whole meal, and I thought nothing about any of it, because I was busy not watching one man move around a ballroom.
I was at the rail on the mezzanine with a drink when I found him in the crowd. He was not alone.