Chapter 4
KNOX
The television in the Frostbite Arena locker room was showing a map of Minnesota colored in shades of red and purple.
The meteorologist was pointing at a block of weather that covered the entire northwest quadrant and then some.
A historic system. Once-in-a-decade. The terminology had shifted sometime between the overnight briefing and now.
Now they were using words like catastrophic.
I had been listening since five-thirty in the morning.
I had not slept. The bed in Maple Sutton’s grandmother’s apartment had been too small and the dark too complete and my brother had been there in the way he was always there now—a weight in the chest, a name I did not say out loud.
I had gotten up at three. Had made coffee in the kitchen of the small clean apartment that smelled like cedar because it had been loved and maintained for as long as the woman who loved it was alive.
I had sat at the table with the coffee and a stack of printouts — the team’s forward roster, the league standings, the play-by-play logs from the first three games — and I had not read any of them.
I had been thinking about the woman in the house twenty feet from me, wearing his jacket to bed because the man in the weather report was wrong and seventeen inches was going to be twenty-four by morning and the power was going to go out and her furnace had never been updated past 1997.
By four-thirty I had driven to the rink.
By five-thirty I was watching the television with my arms crossed and my jaw tight and the understanding that something was about to change.
Maddox came in at five forty-two. Beckham at five-fifty. The rest of the team trickled in starting at six. By six-forty-five the entire front office and coaching staff had assembled itself in front of the television, and the meteorologist was pointing at the exact moment the system made landfall.
Fourteen hours.
“We cancel,” Maddox said. It was not a question.
“Cancel what,” Beckham said.
“The road trip. Duluth. Saturday night, right?”
“Yeah.”
“We cancel. We hunker. The rink has capacity. We have cots in the back. We have the kitchen.”
Wilder was already nodding. The captain’s role — note the problem and signal agreement — the rest of the team felt it and fell into line.
Hudson was talking about pulling guys’ families in.
Theo Nash was already on his phone. Banks was quiet in the way he had been quiet since his wife died, the way you are quiet when the world was already bad once and your body recognized the setup.
I listened to the logistics unfold. How many cots.
How much food. How long the rink would hold heat if the power went out.
Where the backup generator was located. Whether it had been serviced.
The answer was yes, it had been serviced last month.
Beckham was thorough about the things that could be managed.
About the things that could be prepared for in advance.
Beckham was also, I understood, the kind of man who had accepted that you could not save everyone. That sometimes you had to choose between the structure and the person. That the rink was the priority because the rink could hold people. The rink was infrastructure.
No one asked whether they should check on people in town.
No one asked whether there were individuals whose houses might not be heated.
No one asked whether there was a woman who ran a diner and probably did not have a generator and definitely did not have supplies because she was too busy trying to keep the bank from taking her grandmother’s building.
Beckham and Maddox were talking about power priority — the rink’s generator would keep the common areas warm. The locker rooms. The offices. The weight room could cycle if they staggered its use.
I waited.
I waited through the conversation about food supply. Through the contingency discussion about water in case the municipal lines froze. Through the entire careful choreography of thirteen men deciding how to survive the next three days without losing the town.
When the conversation had cycled back to itself for the second time, when the redundancy had set in and no new information was coming, I stood up.
Maddox looked over.
“What,” Maddox said.
“Has anyone checked on the people in town.”
The conversation stopped.
Beckham said, “The town has its own emergency services. The sheriff has a plan. We’re the rink. We hold position. We wait it out.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
“I know.”
I let that sit.
Maddox said, “Knox.”
I said, “No.”
“No what.”
“No, you have not checked on the people in town.”
“We have not. We are going to assume they are prepared, and if they are not prepared, they are going to use the emergency services that are designed to service them, and we are going to make sure that the Fury has the resources to do our job, which is to maintain this rink as a shelter if the evacuation becomes necessary. That is how this works.”
I knew how it worked.
I had read the emergency management protocols when I arrived. I was the new assistant coach. I had read everything.
I knew that Beckham was right. That the rink’s role was structural, not personal. That the town had infrastructure. That you could not save anyone by burning yourself down first.
I also knew that the diner was one block off the lake, and the diner was old, and the diner’s furnace was probably newer than the woman who ran it was old, but probably not by much.
I said, “The diner girl.”
Maddox said, “Is fine. She has a propane stove.”
“That does not mean the house is heated.”
“Knox.”
I did not answer.
I left.
I walked out of the locker room and down the corridor and through the commons and out the side door into the weather that was starting to thicken. Not snow yet. Clouds. Wind. The smell of it. The barometric pressure sitting heavy on my shoulders.
I drove to the hardware store.
The drive took ten minutes. The sky was going dark faster now. The clouds were moving in like something alive. The wind had picked up to the point where it was starting to push the truck sideways on the straightaways.
The hardware store in Frostbite Falls was on the same block as the bank and the post office, a rectangle of brick and single-pane windows that had been there since before I was born.
The windows were old enough that they rattled when the wind hit them.
There were snow drifts piling up against the storefront.
I parked and went in, letting the wind push the door shut behind me.
The man at the counter was old. Seventy, maybe. Had the look of someone who had been born in Minnesota and was going to stay in Minnesota even if Minnesota killed him. His name tag said Frank, and he had been running this place long enough to see things change and then change back again.
“Morning,” the man said. His voice was the voice of someone who knew everybody and their business.
I did not answer with words. I did not have time for conversation.
I walked the aisles. I picked up a generator.
The small one, not the massive one, because I had a truck and the massive one was going to be a logistics problem.
I added a second space heater. Not matching the one she had.
A newer model. Quieter. I knew the brand because my grandmother had used one in Saint Paul when she came to visit Caleb and me in 1998.
She had said this one does not smell like burning dust, and she had been right.
I added bottled water. Five gallon jugs. Three of them. I added canned food. Beans. Soup. Chili. Things that required heat but provided it. I added a can of coffee. A box of matches. A flashlight. A battery-powered radio.
I added things I was not sure she needed, because the storm was going to last three days and three days was a long time to spend in a house that was about to lose its heat, and she was going to be alone, and I was going to be two blocks away pretending to read plays.
I loaded it all into the cart.
At the register, the old man looked at the pile and looked at me.
“That for the rink shelter,” the man said.
“No.”
“For personal use.”
“No.”
The old man rang it up anyway. He did not ask more questions. He was the kind of man who understood that some information came from silence, and some men preferred the sound of it.
The bill was four hundred thirty-seven dollars.
I paid it in cash. I always paid in cash. I had learned that somewhere in the thirteen years I had been not drinking. That cash was a kind of visibility, that showing people the actual weight of your spending kept you honest. I counted out the bills. I did not tip. I loaded the bags myself.
I drove to Maple’s house.
I parked in the street, not the driveway.
I did not want her to think I was staying.
I did not want her to think anything at all until I was gone.
I unloaded the generator and the space heater and the water and the cans and the other things.
I set them all in the mudroom — the small room between the house and the garage where coats lived and the door to the basement was and where her grandmother’s gardening tools still hung on hooks — and I did not knock. I did not announce myself.
I placed the generator on the far side, heavy and deliberate.
I set the space heater next to the door where the cold was coming in, positioned so that when she opened the mudroom door tomorrow morning the first thing she would see was heat.
I positioned the water in the middle, the five-gallon jugs like sentries.
I arranged the cans on the washer in a pyramid — five on the bottom, one on top.
Tidy. Organized. The kind of arrangement that would be impossible to ignore.
The kind of arrangement that said: I have thought about your survival.
I have gone out in weather. I have spent money I have not spent in two years on a woman I have known for three days.