Chapter 17 Riley - February 2019, Pittsburgh
In my family nobody sits down with a thing. It goes out to the garage.
My dad found out his own father died on a Tuesday morning and went to work Tuesday afternoon. When he came home he rebuilt a carburetor on the kitchen table with newspaper under it. My mother let him, and nobody in that house said a word about it for a week and a half.
So I did what we do.
It was not calm. It just looked like discipline from the outside.
Moose watched all of it from four feet away with a shipwreck book in his hands. "You are scoring a great deal," he said, on a plane somewhere over Ohio.
"I'm on a heater."
"You are not on a heater. A heater is luck. You are working like a man paying something off, and I've seen men pay things off, and none of them looked like they were enjoying it either."
"That's very poetic, big guy."
"It is not poetic, it is inefficient." He turned a page. "Grief is inefficient fuel. It burns hot and it burns out and it takes the pan with it."
"Whose grief?"
"I did not say. I have declined to specify, and I'll go on declining, and you may sit there and be annoyed about it for the rest of the flight."
"You said grief, Ludvig. That's a word about a person."
Moose read his book about a boat.
Bo did not take a regret. I found out in November when I tried to skip a Sunday for a nap and got a phone call in which a man with a number in the rafters asked me, in his gravel, whether I understood how a roast works.
So I kept going, and the first Sunday in February I sat at that table for two hours and never once took my phone out of my pocket.
There was nothing to take it out for. Before I left, Bo came out onto the front step with me while I put my boots on, arms folded in the cold in a cardigan. "You're quiet."
"I've been talking for two hours."
"You've been loud. That's different." He looked out at the driveway. "You've checked that phone every Sunday since October. You do it under the table and you think nobody's got the angle. Tonight, nothing. So either it's broken or something is."
"It's a phone, Bo."
"Sure." He said it the way you'd say it about a limp a guy swears is nothing, and he did not ask a follow-up. "Drive slow, it's icing."
He went back inside, and I sat in my truck at the bottom of his driveway for a minute with my hands on the wheel.
The February game was in our building on the 20th and it was the ugliest game either of us has ever played. There is a version of hockey where two teams hate each other for a television audience and there is a version where it is real, and you can tell the difference from the concourse.
In the second period I finished him on a puck along the wall. Legal. Late by the exact amount that is still legal. I got shoulder-to-shoulder with him and rode him into the boards, and the glass banged, and eighteen thousand people came up out of their seats.
He got up and came after me and I turned into it, and we had each other's gloves half off and my hands were in his sweater and his face was two inches from mine. "Feel better?"
"Not even a little. You?"
"No," he said. "Do it again anyway. Do it harder and do it in the third, because it's the only conversation we've had in a month and I've been going back over this one all week."
The linesmen got in. The refs gave us matching roughing minors and we sat in the two boxes with the timekeeper between us and stared, and I could hear the booth above me because they pipe it into the box in that building. "This rivalry has finally found its teeth," some guy said.
We'd spent two years faking it. That was our whole joke, from a loading dock in April 2017, that the hate was the cover story.
I sat in a penalty box and hated the fact that it was not a cover story anymore, and I looked at him through two panes of glass and a man with a stopwatch, and he was looking back, and I'd bet anything I own that he was hating the same thing at the same second.
We lost by two. He had an assist. Nothing after. No bar, no proposal, no counteroffer, no number. I sat in my stall for a long time and answered questions about the forecheck.
Four days later my phone went in the evening while I was in the parking lot of a grocery store.
Nate: Tuesday. 11:45pm. 1140 Creek Road, Downingtown PA.
That's all of it. No name, no greeting, no insult, which meant it was not safe, which meant it was real. Three weeks of nothing, and then an address in Chester County like a flare going up over water.
We had a Tuesday night game in Philadelphia. He knew that. Everybody knows everybody's schedule, and he knows mine the way I know his, which is to say completely and without ever having admitted it.
I did not answer it.
We played Tuesday and lost by three. Afterward I got a rental and drove west out of the city with my phone on the seat, running the two arguments the whole way.
The first was that nobody who does what he did gets to send an address.
The second was that I'd been on the ice for three weeks of hockey and had not once known what any of it was for.
I got there before midnight. A road with a chain-link fence, a rink with a low roof and pigeons in it, two cars in the lot and one of them his.
I sat in the car for a long time. I turned the engine off and then on again twice for the heat. I drafted an opening line and it kept getting worse every time I drafted it. I got as far as putting my hand on the door handle twice. Then I went in.
The lobby had one light on and a note on the counter that said back at one, in marker. The doors to the rink were propped. He'd paid for a flood, because the ice was fresh, wet and shining under half the lights, and there was that smell that gets into your whole head.
And Nate Sinclair was standing at the boards in a hoodie and skates with his gloves on the dasher and two coffees on the bench beside him.
I came down the rubber. He turned. "You're late."
"There's traffic in Chester County."
"There is not traffic in Chester County. There are four roads and a horse." He handed me one of the cups. "That one's yours. Don't make a thing of it."
It was mine. It was the color of a hockey sock. Somebody had put three sugars into a gas station coffee and destroyed it with cream, in a car, in the dark, on purpose.
"Skate or talk?" he said.
"Skate."
We skated for an hour and neither of us said one word. No pucks. No bets. Two guys going around an empty sheet, sometimes side by side and mostly not, and the sound of two pairs of skates in a building with a roof full of birds is the loudest quiet there is.
I did about thirty laps before my chest came down. Somewhere in there he came up on my inside and stayed there for a while, matching me, not saying anything, and I let him.
At the end we came back to the boards where the coffees were, both of us breathing, steam coming off both of us. He put his forearms on the dasher and looked out at the ice. "Uncle Marsh did it alone."
I didn't say anything.
"He moved a seating chart on the Friday and he placed the item on the Sunday and he did not tell me.
I found out in a hotel gym off my phone.
You found out off a bank of monitors in a concourse, and I stood there and watched it happen to you.
" He was looking at the far net. "I called him from a stairwell and I killed the item, and then I killed the program.
Not paused. Killed. There is no version of it in March or next season or ever, and I told him that in a voice I've never used on anybody in my family in my life. "
"Okay."
"He offered it to me the first time at a lunch in July 2017 and I said no.
He offered it again in March and I said no with more force than the question deserved, and I heard it come off my own kitchen wall.
He's offered it twice, Riley, and I've said no twice, and I've never once let myself sit down and ask why a man says no that hard to a thing he doesn't care about. "
I put both hands on the boards.
"And the reason I'm telling you," he said, "is that nobody bet me for this.
There's no coin. You don't owe me anything and I'm not asking you for anything back.
I could have written it out. I drafted it four different ways in a hotel and every one of them read like a statement, and you'd have known inside a line that it was a statement, and you'd have been right. "
"So you bought a flood instead."
"Yes. It cost $90 and it's the best decision I've made this year.
" He turned the cup around in his hands.
"The only arrangement I'm running is a stupid two-man fantasy hockey league with a constitution written on Marriott notepaper, and last month it lost its other member, and I haven't been able to work since.
I've been going out there and getting the reads right and none of it has meant anything, and I'd like you to understand how new that is for me. "
The building did that thing where the compressors kick on.
He did not say the other thing. I stood there and felt it come all the way up to the front of him and stop.
There is a space on that notepad. It's between rule six and where we wrote our names. It's about an inch and a half of nothing, and there's a word that goes in it, and both of us had been looking at that inch and a half for a year, and neither of us had ever written it or said it.
He got right up to the edge of it. I watched him get there.
"That's all I've got," he said instead.
"That's a lot."
"It's not enough."
"No. But it's more than I've ever had, and you paid for a flood in a building with birds in it to say it to me."
"Noted."
We stood there for a while. Then he picked up his coffee and drank about half of it, black, in one go, like a guy taking medicine. "Yours is disgusting."
"Mine is engineered."
"Somebody made that in a car."
"Somebody made it correctly in a car, in the dark, on purpose, and that's the difference between a professional and whatever you are."
He laughed out loud in an empty rink at one thirty in the morning, and the roof took it and threw it back down at us twice.
I drove east and got back to the team hotel at some ridiculous hour, and at ten to three, sitting on the end of my bed with my coat still on, I sent it.
Riley: Expansion Communiqué. the commissioner's office is in receipt of an application from a returning franchise and has elected to approve it, effective immediately, ratification pending nothing.
terms: the returning club shall pay a punitive luxury tax for a period of not less than one full season, said tax payable in dessert.
all future disputes to be settled by binding arbitration before a neutral third party.
the parties designate Stan. stan has not been consulted and will not be.
relegation is reinstated. there's still nowhere to go
The read receipt came back immediately, which meant Nate in Philadelphia was awake at ten to three with a phone in his hand.
Nate: The tax is excessive and the arbitrator is illiterate. Accepted.
Neither of us said the word withdrawal out loud after that. It went straight into the drawer with everything else, the entire inventory of things we both pretend did not happen and neither of us will ever forget.
On the drive back toward Philadelphia I finally let myself have the finding of that month. I did not go back because the explanation was good. The explanation was fine. Uncles do things, publicists do things, and if it had been anybody else on earth I'd have told them where to put it and meant it.
I went back because three weeks of silence had been worse than any risk I can currently name out loud.
In March the league had an idea. They mic'd us up, both of us, same game, for a feature they were calling a rivalry special, with a truck full of producers and a segment producer who kept saying the word authentic.
The whole thing was on the internet. There's a bit where I chirp their goalie about his water bottle and a bit where Nate says something extremely rude about our power play, and it's all real. We gave them everything they wanted.
And then, in the third, we're both on for a defensive-zone draw, and I set up to the right of our center with Nate six feet off my shoulder.
The linesman is late, and there are four seconds of dead air.
I turn my head and say, on a live microphone, "Formally proposing my 19 for your 14, Sinclair. Straight up. Tonight."
There is a beat after that on the tape. One beat of nothing, from a man who had not lost a sentence on camera since he was sixteen except one time in a hallway in Chicago.
Then, "19's got a bad contract and he doesn't backcheck."
And I laughed into my own mouthguard as our center won the draw.
The segment aired on a Thursday to what the network called an enormous response. A guy on a panel said, "That's the best nine minutes of hockey television all year, and you cannot manufacture this stuff."
Both of us watched it alone, in two different cities, five hundred miles apart. And I'd bet the building that both of us went straight back to 6:41 and watched that beat again, because late that night my phone lit up.
Nate: Your audio is terrible. They had you on the collar and you talk into your own chest.
Riley: Timestamp 6:41
Nate: Go to sleep, Kowalski.
Riley: six forty one, sinclair!
Nate: Goodnight.