Chapter 21
Chapter twenty-one
Varga
Imade Rook a sandwich he didn’t ask for and didn’t eat, but I did a good job because it was the only thing I could do something about.
I used the seeded bread from the place on Halsted.
The turkey was chunks taken off the bone, not the wet, thin-sliced deli stuff.
I spread grainy mustard edge to edge so no corner of it came out dry.
He sat four feet away from me, not talking the whole time.
It was a game-day afternoon. We usually spent it lying down, letting our legs forget the morning skate, so they’d remember how to work in the evening.
I couldn’t lie down without Rook. He’d come in from the driveway two hours ago, set his phone face-down on the island, and gone quiet in a way I’d never seen before.
He sat at the table with his hands flat, looking straight ahead at nothing.
“You pulled it,” I said. “All of it. Mark and Kovac both.”
“Mark’s parked. I told Kovac to kill the entire piece.” He didn’t look up. “Texted him from the truck.”
“And he said?”
“Dots came up. I put the phone down before I had to read it.”
I cut the sandwich on the diagonal like my mother does and set it in front of him. He said thank you and let it sit.
I let him sit like that for three minutes more while I cleaned up, leaving only the plate with the sandwich out.
“Okay,” I said. “Here’s what’s not happening. We don’t walk in there tonight like we did something wrong this morning, and we don’t let a guy on a one-year deal force us to keep hiding.”
“We pulled the announcement through Mark. We’re not doing it tonight.”
“I know. I’m not talking about tonight.” I sat down across from Rook.
“I’m talking about how we walk in. We pulled the part where we say it.
Fine. We didn’t pull the part where we walk in there with our heads up.
So we put the hockey costume on, and we walk in, without flinching, and the room does whatever the room’s going to do. ”
He looked at me then. It was the first time all afternoon that his eyes fully focused.
“You’re handling this,” he said.
“Somebody in this house has to. You’ve used up your turn.
” I picked up half of the sandwich and put it in his hands.
“Eat. You don’t make sense when you haven’t eaten.
Then you’re going to lie down for an hour, and I’m going to lie down next to you, and tonight we’re going to go play hockey like the professionals we apparently still are. ”
He ate half of it. I took that as a win.
Upstairs, I pulled the blinds, and we lay on top of the duvet in our clothes because neither of us was going to sleep. He rolled onto his side, and I put my palm flat between his shoulder blades.
I reached behind me with the free hand and grabbed the carved bird off the nightstand. Then I pushed it around in front of him.
“Hold on to it. It helps. You don’t have to do anything; you just hold it.” I closed his fingers around it. His hands were cold. “Did I ever tell you it has a name?”
“No.”
“Gretzky.”
That got half a laugh out of Rook.
“I talked to my grandmother on the phone about a month after we landed. I knew four English words by then, and one of them was Gretzky.” My body tucked in closer against his back.
“She didn’t speak English, but she knew a Slavic name when she heard one.
I think she figured I’d named it after a neighbor she didn’t like.
So now here’s a Hungarian heirloom with a Russian hockey name, and it’s going to get us through tonight. ”
He held it and said nothing for a while. Then his thumb moved over it, the way mine had a million times, and his breathing slowed.
We didn’t sleep, but it was the good kind of not-sleeping. At five-forty we got up and put our suits on, and when I came back from the bathroom, the bird was sitting on Rook’s nightstand, not mine.
***
The locker room was too quiet. Conversations were pitched in a lower tone than usual, and they stopped when I walked in. At least a dozen eyes focused on me.
Dahl was in his suit, leaning against the far wall. I started in before my bag hit the floor. I was still the loud guy out front who filled the space until the danger got bored and wandered off.
“Rafe.” I crossed to the kid, who had a skate half-laced while he looked around the room with his careful prairie eyes.
“Here’s today’s lesson. A scratched man decides he’s a philosopher.
He has no game of his own to play, so he decides to play everybody else’s.
Do not engage with that. He’s like a guy at a bar at last call—“
“Funny,” Dahl said. “Do you do encores?”
It was a real shot, and it landed, because for half a second I didn’t know if the room was still mine. That’s the one thing the loud guy can’t chirp his way out of—a room that decides it’s tired of him. I reached for the next loud thing on pure reflex, to paper over the gap before—
Cross got there first.
He didn’t stand or raise his voice; I’ve never once heard him raise it. He had one shin pad on and the other across his knee, and he looked directly at Dahl.
“You’re a scratch who chirped the best d-man I’ve played with about his relationship.” He paused. “Go worry about your gap.”
Then he buckled the second pad.
Across the room, Pratt looked up.
He took Dahl in for a second, the long flat read, and then he looked at me for less than that. Pratt only speaks when something’s wrong. We’d all known that since his rookie season.
He looked at Dahl again. “Mind your gap.” A small laugh spread through the room.
I dropped onto my bench and pulled my gear out.
Rook came in after. He didn’t know yet. He couldn’t have, but I watched him clear the door and do the thing he does, a half-second scan he thinks nobody sees.
He read the room like he reads a rush coming at him. Dahl was still standing at the far wall in his suit, and the room was too quiet. Rook knew it was about him.
Mark poked his head in. “Fifteen, gentlemen.”
“Fifteen what? Fifteen minutes? Fifteen reporters? Fifteen years until I get a stall with more legroom?” I spread my arms wide. “Mark, talk to me. Use your words.”
“Goodbye, Lucas.” The room laughed. It was genuine laughter.
Markel appeared next. His entire speech was three sentences long.
“It’s our building, home ice. Nothing that happened in here today follows us out there. Play our game, nobody else’s.”
***
We played a classic Ironhawks game.
The first period was stiff for both teams, but the second opened up.
Cross won a draw in their end, clean, and sent it straight back to Rook at the point. Rook took two steps along the line to pull their winger toward him, and the second the lane bent, he sent it down to me on the half-wall.
I caught it with a defenseman closing in and held until he committed his hips. That’s when I sent it back to Cross, where the lane was opening.
Rafe arrived on the opposite wing. He got his stick on it and redirected it under the goalie’s glove. The lamp lit, and two hundred Saskatchewan pounds folded me into the glass at full speed. Nineteen thousand people roared and stomped. I laughed into the kid’s cage.
They pushed back in the third and wouldn’t go down easily. For four consecutive minutes their top line lived in our zone. Rook stayed with them.
He sent the puck off the glass and out twice. He blocked one with the inside of his ankle. Pratt made one save that was worth a highlight reel. He plucked a shot out of the air with his glove.
We were up by two with under two minutes left , and they pulled their goalie out of the net. Markel sent Rook’s pair out, and they held the house. Their point man wound up for a one-timer and Rook stepped right into the lane, knocked it down with his stick and looked up the ice.
Two hundred feet of rink opened between him and the empty net. He didn’t slap it. He chipped it. It was a flat, lazy, perfect chip that rode the ice and died in the back of the net like he’d walked it down and set it in by hand.
We were up by three at the horn.
Dahl watched from the press box. He was gone before we left the ice.
In the corridor past the cameras, where the carpet starts, I caught up to Rook. “Hey, are you good?”
“Yeah.” He meant it.
“Dahl’s done at the end of the year,” I said. “And I want—“ The claws came out before I could stop them. It was the part of me that wanted to find him in the parking lot and tell him exactly which gaps to mind for the rest of his career that had little left. I had the breath in me to say it.
I let it out instead. Erasing Dahl wouldn’t make us safer. It would only be me repeating his brand of cruelty.
“Leave it,” I said.
“Yeah,” Rook said. “Leave it.”
Then he did a thing he never did forty feet from a camera. He knocked his shoulder into mine, once, the way the dads do after a beer-league game.
The room had the same stalls, same guys, and same smell of a hundred games soaked into the rubber on the floor, but the volume was back up around the ceiling where it belonged.
Someone’s playlist was too loud. Rafe stood in the middle of it with the player-of-the-game helmet jammed down over his ears.
I planted myself in front of his stall.
“Speech,” I said.
“I’m not giving a speech.”
“He’s giving a speech. Quiet, animals.” I got two guys to actually quiet down, a minor miracle. “Go ahead, Rafe. Thank your linemates and thank the academy. Thank the genius left-winger who put it on a platter—“
“I tipped it,” Rafe said. “You missed the net.”
The room lost it. Somebody threw a roll of tape at me. I took it in the chest like a man.
“I missed the net,” I told the ceiling. “Eight points in his last six and he’s chirping the guy who taught him where the net is.” I pointed at the kid. “Saskatchewan. No respect. They raise them in a barn, and it shows.”
“You’d know about barns,” Cross said, not looking up.
He was peeling tape off at his stall, unbothered, like he hadn’t reset the entire room three hours ago with one shin pad on his knee. He says about four things a night, and one of them’s usually at my expense. I’d never been happier to be his target. I put a hand on my heart.
“That’s two,” I said. “Two complete sentences out of Julian Cross. Write it down, somebody. Mark the date.”
I didn’t thank him. You don’t thank Cross.
Down the wall, Pratt was already half out of his gear, back to the rest of us. He didn’t turn around to look. He’d said his one thing, and he was done for the week, probably the month.
Rook caught my eye across the room for less than a second. He gave me the chin-lift he gives everybody, the one that reads as good game and went back to his skates.
Rafe finally wrestled the helmet off and set it in his stall like it might break.
“You did good, kid,” I told him, quieter, just us.
He blushed red to the ears and said nothing.
We’d come in two cars, like always, and we left in two cars.
Snow had started to fall. I had the heat up and nothing on the radio.
The West Loop Ironhawks billboard came up on the right. Cross was in his jersey, arms crossed, wearing that emotionless face. He was forty feet tall, looming over the first mile on the Edens.
I raised a fist to him through the windshield as I went by. Then I drove home to the guy whose picture isn’t on any billboard.
At home, Rook was at the kitchen table when I came in, and his phone was sitting on the island.
“I’m calling Kovac in the morning,” he said. “We’re going to do this right. I’ll tell him the story’s his.”
“Are you sure?”
“No,” he said. “But I’m calling him anyway. It’s the right thing to do.”