2. First Shift #2
Riley and Maya exchanged a brief glance. Maya returned to the crate she was unpacking.
“Small town,” Riley said, and left. She winked again, this time with finger guns, and was gone.
Neither of them said anything, but the room felt different after Riley left. Outside, a truck started up in the alley and pulled away, and the bar settled back into its ordinary Thursday afternoon.
“I should go get ready,” Caleb said.
“Eat something real after,” Maya said.
He said he would, and went upstairs.
The Veil Lake Arena was older than it looked.
It had the smell all arenas have: cold rubber and Zamboni exhaust and years of stale concession popcorn, the smells absorbed over ten thousand games.
Caleb stood in the lobby with his bag over his shoulder and felt fourteen again, which was not entirely unpleasant.
Connor was already there, talking to a man built like a refrigerator. He saw Caleb come through the door and gave him a nod and a friendly smile that only just touched his eyes. The smile of a friend? A casual acquaintance?
Caleb returned the nod and the smile, and went to find the locker room.
Eight men were in various states of dress, with the royal blue and gold Prospectors jerseys hanging or half-on around the room.
Two players were taping sticks with the absorbed focus of men performing a ritual.
Blade first, specific overlap, the kind of thing done the same way every time without thinking about it.
Someone had a particular way of doing his shin pads, one strap tighter than the other, the adjustment made before anything else.
Caleb had grown up in a world of rituals and knew one when he saw it, even here.
They looked up, assessed briefly, and returned to their business.
The man with the grey beard and the unofficial-mayor quality pointed at an empty spot on the bench.
“New guy goes there. Tradition.”
“What’s the tradition?”
“That the new guy sits there and we decide if we like him.” He stuck out his hand. “Danny Kowalski. Everyone calls me Kowalski. Danny sounds too friendly and I have a reputation to maintain.”
“Um, okay.” Caleb responded like he was asking a question, shaking the offered hand.
“He works very hard at it,” said the man next to him, without looking up from his shin pads.
This was offered with the flat delivery of a man who had used the same line many times and found it reliable.
Caleb detected a slight French Canadian accent beneath it all.
“Marc Tremblay. The big guy by the door is Pete. He doesn’t talk much.
Not in here, at least. Talks a lot of shit on the ice, though. ”
Pete nodded from the door with an expression suggesting this was accurate.
“And that,” Kowalski said, gesturing toward the corner where a younger man was retaping an already-taped stick, “is Bryce Holt. Bryce, say hello to the new guy.”
Bryce looked up. He was maybe thirty-two, the kind of good-looking that knew it, with the easy physicality of a man who’d played organized sports his whole life and built his sense of self on the understanding that his body worked.
He had a grin that arrived quickly and stayed long enough that Caleb wasn’t quite sure if it was warm or baiting him.
“Fresh meat,” Bryce said. “Welcome to the Island of Misfit Jocks. You play before?”
“Pond hockey. Some pickup.”
“So, no.” He said it without heat, grinning. “Don’t worry, we’ll fix that. What’s your name?”
“Caleb.”
Bryce turned to Kowalski. “Biblical,” he said.
“My parents,” Caleb said, almost an apology.
“Say no more.” Bryce mimed a cross, briefly, and grinned.
“We’ve all got our crosses to bear.” He went back to his stick, the conversation apparently done in his mind, and Caleb sat down and started pulling out his equipment and told himself the cross thing was just a joke, a shorthand, not worth the small flicker it had produced somewhere in his chest.
Bryce seemed like a man who joked about everything with that same reckless indifference.
Caleb had grown up around men who used words with precision and purpose, measured twice, spoken once.
Still, nobody worked that hard to make everything a joke without a reason.
He filed the thought away without knowing where it belonged.
Connor came in last. He suited up two spaces down from Caleb without comment. It was probably coincidence. Caleb was mildly annoyed with himself for caring enough to wonder.
At one point, reaching for his helmet, Connor gave Caleb a half-second of actual attention, more specific than the general-team nod at the door and quickly neutralized. Caleb found his skates very interesting until the game gave him somewhere else to focus.
“Wing?” Connor said, not looking up from his skates.
“Left, mostly.”
“We’ll start you there. See how you read the play.”
Connor finished his laces and was gone before Caleb could decide what he had expected.
There was nothing from the cabin in his voice, nothing that acknowledged what had happened at the cabin, and Caleb understood why.
It was ice time, eight other men were getting dressed around them, and you played by the rules.
He knew that. The disappointment was still there, caught somewhere under the memory of fire and blanket and Connor’s arm across his chest, so he put that away too.
The locker room pulled at him in ways he hadn’t expected.
He’d expected the jokes and got them, a little faster and cruder than he was used to, with the natural rhythm of men who had been chatting like this for years.
He’d expected the noise. The clatter of gear, the debate about some call from last week’s game, Pete’s surprising volume once he was in motion. What he hadn’t expected was the bodies.
Not the way he’d feared, not that. Well, not only that.
What surprised him was how ordinary it was.
Men changed, towelled off, and argued about the game.
Nobody watched anybody. Nobody seemed afraid of being watched.
Caleb had grown up managing his body and his desires as problems waiting to happen.
Covered, disciplined, corrected before anyone else had reason to notice.
It’s not that his parents had been somehow cruel about such matters.
You’d never see his dad waving a placard condemning people like him.
His mom never made gagging noises when gay sex was mentioned, unlike most of the women in her Bible study group.
They would pray for people “struggling” and move on.
Caleb genuinely wondered if their restraint was a reflection of some small measure of compassion or merely because, on some level, they knew how close to home all of this landed.
Once, after a Sunday evening potluck, his dad had talked the whole drive home about a boy from another church who had gone away to college and come back “different.” Caleb didn’t know the boy, but he heard what his father left unsaid.
His mom had looked out the passenger window with the casserole dish wrapped in a towel on her lap.
The boy needed strong men around him, his dad went on, men who would show him how a godly man was supposed to live.
Caleb had watched the dark road open in the headlights and kept his hands flat on his thighs, as though any movement might confess the fear and shame he felt.
That was what came back to him in locker rooms: not any of the threatening sermons he’d heard throughout his life, but the years of learning how to behave, where to look, and how bodies, his and others, were risks to be managed.
Keep your body unremarkable. Don’t give anyone a reason to look. Or wonder.
But here, in the locker room, a body was just a body.
Still, he kept his eyes down as much as he could, a habit he had already mastered. Underneath the discipline, though, was a new sense of permission. The first faint glimmer of trust in himself.
Bryce was holding court in the corner by the showers, telling a story about a game two seasons back that involved a ref, a misplaced puck, and what Bryce described as “the worst call since God created this shithole.” He was a natural performer, timing his pauses, reading his audience.
Caleb found himself laughing twice at jokes that would have once made him blush.
“The ref,” Bryce was saying, building toward his grievance, “looks me dead in the eye, dead in the eye, and says, and I quote, ‘That’s not what I saw.’ And I’m standing there thinking, brother, we were all there.
We all saw it. Unless you’ve got a medical condition I’m not aware of, you saw it too.
” He shook his head with theatrical sadness.
“Anyway, Marc got a game misconduct and I got a talking-to from Kowalski, which was frankly worse.”
“I was very supportive,” Kowalski said.
“You called me a liability to the species.”
“Supportively.”
Caleb laughed again. Bryce caught it and pointed at him with the ease of a man who was always tracking his audience.
“See, the new guy gets it. What’s your read, Caleb? Was that a penalty or a hate crime?”
“I wasn’t there,” Caleb said.
“Irrelevant. Based on the word of an unimpeachable witness alone.”
“Then probably somewhere in between.”
Bryce grinned. “Diplomatic. I like it.” He said it to the room, not to Caleb.
The thing about Bryce, he thought, was that the jokes went right to the edge and stopped there.
Or mostly stopped there. There was a moment, mid-story, when he’d described the opposing team’s center as skating like he was afraid someone was going to grab his ass and the line had gotten a laugh that Caleb had joined out of practiced habit even though he’d clocked it.
He hated the instinct, a reflex he had accepted before reading the fine print.
He could play.