Chapter 31 Nate - August 2024, the Azores, Portugal
It was an hour up the coast on foot and there was no road to it, and he re-litigated Chicago for the entire climb.
"Seven years," he said. "Seven years, and I want one thing clear before we get up there, which is that I was right."
"You were not right."
"I was twenty-one years old and I'd known you for ninety minutes.
I was in a cinder block room with a bowl of pretzels.
And I said the words haunted lighthouse energy out loud to a stranger.
" He went up over a rock and put his hand back without turning around, which he had started doing on day four and which I had started taking.
"And then that night you came down to a ballroom wearing two hundred of them. "
"The tie was mailed to me in a box."
"By your mother, who has known you your whole life, which is my entire case. You've got a woman in Camden, Maine, who has never once been told anything, mailing you documentary evidence four times a year, and I read it off you in an hour and a half."
"You called it an insult at the time."
"It was an insult! It was the founding insult of this entire civilization." He stopped on the path and turned around. "And you wore it anyway. That's the part I've never gotten over. I called your tie haunted at eleven in the morning and you went upstairs and put it on."
I did not say anything, because in my jacket pocket, folded flat, was seven years of navy silk that I had carried up a cliff without mentioning it to anybody.
The wind up there came off the Atlantic with nothing in front of it for two thousand miles and it hit like a bodycheck. The tower was white with a red cap on it, standing on black rock, and there was a keeper's cottage and a wall and a dog.
He looked at all of it for about a minute with his hands on his hips. "Okay. Heptathlon."
"No."
"Best of seven, then. Full honesty game, all events drawn from the historical record, and I've had the card written since June.
" He got a folded piece of paper out of his pocket, gone soft the way paper goes when a man carries it.
"Stakes are the classic. Loser owes the winner one completely honest answer to any question. No dodging."
"Riley."
"Sinclair, we have never once needed a different stake and we have never once used a bigger one." He held it out. "Read the card."
I read the card.
Event one. Hart Trophy winners, backward from the present, alternating. First man who blanks loses.
Event two. Stone skipping off the point. Best of five throws.
Event three. First to win the affection of the lighthouse keeper's dog.
Event four. Stair race, top to bottom of the tower.
Event five. Whoever can hold the plank longer on the wall, which is a leg event and which I will win.
Event six. Cards after dinner.
Event seven. Reserved.
"What's event seven?"
"Reserved." He took the card back and folded it. "Call it."
The Harts went a long way back before he lost the thread somewhere in the nineties and blamed the wind, which was fair, because the wind was audible. I took event one. He took the stones easily, with a throw off the point that kept going, and he counted it out loud as it went.
"A bounce off a wave isn't a skip."
"The rules are silent on waves."
"You wrote the rules."
"Exactly," he said, and that was one apiece.
The dog belonged to nobody. There was no keeper, there had not been a keeper on that lighthouse since 1987, and the cottage was a storage building with a padlock, and there was a brown dog with a gray face lying in the shade of the wall who had presumably walked up from the town.
Riley sat down on the ground eight feet away from that animal and did not look at it and started talking to it in a low voice about nothing at all, which is a technique, and which worked inside two minutes, and I lost event three on the merits. Two to one.
The stair race we could not run, because the tower was locked. He argued for a full four minutes that the intent of the event was preserved by racing down the outside path from the wall to the low rock, and that this was, in his words, legally and spiritually an elevator race.
"That's not a stair race. That's a footpath."
"It's a vertical descent under competitive conditions, and the spirit of the rule is that two men go down a thing quickly.
" He was already stretching. "You're arguing procedure because you know you're slow downhill.
You've been slow downhill since 2017 and I've never said it out loud because I've been kind. "
I won it by four feet. Two apiece.
The plank on the wall went the better part of ten minutes and it was the stupidest thing either of us did on that island.
Two professional athletes on the summer's back end, holding a position on a stone wall above the Atlantic, neither one of them willing to be the one, both of us shaking, and him talking the entire time.
"You've got a thing in your left shoulder. It's dropping. I've watched that shoulder for seven years and it's dropping about a degree a minute, and I'd like you to know I've factored it in."
"Be quiet, Riley."
He won it, and then lay flat on his back on that wall saying nothing at all, which is how I knew what it cost. Three to two.
We ate at the farmhouse at eight, and I went upstairs first. I put on a linen shirt and shorts, because that is what a man wears in August on an island, and then I stood in front of a mirror in a two hundred year old bedroom and put on a navy silk tie with two hundred tiny white lighthouses on it.
It looked ridiculous. A formal tie, correctly knotted, over an open linen collar, with shorts and bare feet, in a farmhouse in the middle of the Atlantic. It was also completely correct, and I knew it in the mirror before I got downstairs.
Riley Kowalski was at the terrace table with a bottle and two glasses and the score card in front of him and his mouth already open on a sentence.
He saw it and the sentence stopped. I have made that man stop talking three times in seven years: a corridor in a rink in Slovakia in 2019, a café with three tables in it nine days earlier, and a terrace above a caldera with a tie on.
He did not say anything for a full minute. I counted, because there was nothing else to do.
"You brought it."
"I brought it."
"It's been retired since 2019. You said the word retired on a stool in front of a dozen countries, and I have thought about that word about once a month for five years. Nate, that tie has been in a drawer in a room nobody goes into."
"It's been in the bottom of my bag for fifteen days.
Under the second layer, rolled in tissue paper, in the cube with the shirts.
" I sat down. "It went in the bag the same week a man circled a lighthouse on a map in red pen and handed it to me without one word of commentary, so I'd think carefully before you take a position on who's worse. "
And he looked at me for a second in a way I could not read at all, which is rare, and then he picked up his glass. "Right," he said.
Later, over the plates, he asked it, quietly, with his fork down, and not in the register he used for a bit, which is how I knew he had been carrying it up a cliff all day.
"Do they light up? You know what I'm asking.
April 2017, ballroom in Chicago, thirty hours into knowing you, and I asked you whether the little lighthouses light up when you feel something.
" He turned his glass a quarter turn on the table, which is a thing my grandfather does.
"And you told me that would require them to come on. "
I did not answer him. I did not have to. It was around my neck, over a linen shirt, five years out of quarantine, and there was not one thing I could have said that would have added anything to it.
He looked at it and then at me. "Okay," he said, and picked his fork back up, and his voice had gone somewhere.
Rosalina came at nine with a dish of something and got made an arbiter, which she did not consent to.
He put the score card in front of her and explained the entire tournament in English at speed with gestures.
She listened to about forty seconds of it, looked at the card, looked at the two of us, and delivered a ruling in Portuguese that ran maybe eight words.
He turned to me. "What did she say?"
"She said you are both stupid," I said, "and I think the last part is that neither of you deserves it."
Rosalina said one more thing and pointed at both of us in turn, and then patted my shoulder on the way past and said something to me alone at the door that I got about half of, and which was about the tie.
Cards was six, and cards was mine, and that made it three all with one to play.
Which is exactly how it was always going to arrive, because our entire history was a season series that ended even.
He had a Cup and I had a Norris and neither of us had the other one's, and in thirty-two head-to-head games in the regular season the record was sixteen and sixteen, which I had checked, and which he had checked, and which neither of us had ever said out loud to the other one.
"Event seven," I said.
"Reserved." He put the cards down and squared them, badly, which is a thing he does not do. "Career point totals. Season by season. Yours. I say the number, you confirm or deny, and every miss is a point to you."
And there it was. That was not an event.
That was his kingdom. Riley Kowalski had been reciting the point totals of men he played against since he was in juniors, and it was not a party trick, it was a filing system that ran underneath his entire brain.
He had done it to me on a faceoff dot. He did it to a hedge fund manager at a party in Las Vegas in 2018 to one decimal place.
He had never lost that event, not to me and not to anybody.
"You want to run point totals. Against me."
"Best of seven's got to end somewhere," he said. "Rookie year forward. Sit down."