Chapter 2
Casimir
Glove. Blocker. Chest. Pads. Mask.
I set each piece square to the next. I do not hurry.
I do not think. The not-thinking is the point.
The order is a language. I have spoken it so long my hands say it without me.
The blocker goes down. My fingers find the top corner of the shelf.
Two of them. Once. The way you touch a doorframe before you go through it.
Then the chest protector. Then the leg pads, faces out.
The same faces out they have shown since I was small.
There. The shelf is a sentence. The sentence is complete. The room settles around it. Something in me settles too. Low. Quiet. A water finding its level.
Spokój, my grandmother called it. Peace.
She had a word for the settled feeling and a word for the order that earns it.
Kolejno??. Keep the order and the order keeps you.
She said both over the plates and the folded cloths and the candles set just so.
She was right about all of it. She is gone.
This shelf is the last place I can still hear her.
I was small when she taught me. It is less a memory than a shape a memory left.
Her hands over my hands on the good plates.
The cloth folded in thirds, never in half.
The candle set a thumb from the edge, where it could not reach the curtain.
She smelled like wax and cold flour and the inside of a coat that has been out in the snow.
She was teaching me a way to stay standing.
I thought it was only how a table got set.
I did not understand it as a boy. I understand it now. You cannot stop the thing from coming. You choose only what it finds when it comes. Let it find the plates straight. Let it find the candle set safe. Let it find me in the crease, and the crease in order, and the order holding.
The fluorescent hums. The tube has a tick in it near the end of its life.
I have learned the tick. It is not in the sequence, so it does not touch the sequence.
Someone drops a stick two rooms over. It rings on concrete, a bright ugly sound.
I do not flinch. The order is complete. A complete order can take a dropped stick.
No one else here knows that about me. I am fine when the sentence is finished.
It is the unfinished ones that open the floor.
The gear smells like it always smells. Old sweat gone cold. New tape. I have set my gear in a hundred rooms and every one of them smelled like this one. That’s a kind of home. Not a warm one. A reliable one. I made that trade a long time ago and I do not reopen it.
I am reaching for nothing, my morning done, when the door goes. Then the boy.
I hear him before the door. There’s always a thread of music where he is. It comes off him like heat off a stone in the sun. Then he is in the frame of the room, saying my name.
“Wrobel? You back there?”
I do not answer. I wait for him to leave. Weather waits out a man who will not come inside.
He does not leave. He crosses to the shelf.
I feel it the way you feel a hand near your face in the dark. He picks up my glove and sets it on the right. The sentence breaks. The floor tips.
I put the glove back. I say the thing I say.
It is not an answer. It is not owed to be one.
He grins and needles, and I give him more words than I mean to.
You have never been well-behaved for a full minute in your life.
I am angry at the words the moment they are out.
Words are a door left open. He hears the door.
Of course he hears it. He lives for the sound of a door coming open.
Then I wait for the settled feeling to come home behind the correction, the way it always comes home.
It comes home slow.
That is the part I carry onto the ice, later, when I should carry nothing. It came slow. In the slow, in the open stretch where the peace should already have been, I made the mistake of looking at him.
Grinning. He’s always grinning. A boy’s grin. The grin of someone who decided long ago the world is a joke he is on the inside of. I spent a whole season unbothered by that grin. I mean to spend this one the same.
Fortin. Backup. A variable. Manage it.
You manage a variable by killing its power to surprise you.
I have made a study of him, the way I study a shooter.
He comes first because he is hungry and files it under discipline.
The music is not for him. It is for the silence.
Silence is a thing that happens to him. Noise is a thing he does to it.
He moved the glove not to break me but to watch whether I break.
That’s the worse of the two. A man who wants to hurt you can be answered. A man who only wants to see cannot.
So I do not let him see.
I have a list of him now. It runs longer than it should.
He lifts his chin at the rink kid who never takes the earbuds out.
He knows the name of the man who runs the Zamboni.
He’s warm to everyone and close to no one, and I don’t think he knows there’s a difference.
A man who gives that much away has decided he has more than enough.
I do not know what it is like to decide that.
That is not on the list. I take it off the list. It is not intel. It is only noticing. I have started confusing the two, and confusion is the first crack in any wall.
* * *
Sowa runs the goalies through the warm-up.
The barn is cold in the way it gets before the crowd comes and warms it with bodies.
My breath hangs. My pads are stiff at the first flex and then they are not.
I move through the warm-up the way I move through all of it.
Nothing wasted. Each save a word I have said ten thousand times.
Glove. Blocker. The pad down and sealed and up again.
He watches me more than he coaches me. That is what I need from him, and part of why I can stand him.
“Slow,” he says, when I come up off the second one.
“The ice is slow.”
“The ice is the ice.” He fires the next one before I am set, to see what I do with it. I take it clean. “You are slow because you are listening to the door.”
I am not listening to the door. I do not say so. Saying so would be the same as agreeing.
“Nothing to say?”
“No.”
“Good. A goalie who explains himself is already beaten.” He puts the next puck a foot outside where the last one went, and the conversation is over, because with Sowa the conversation is always over at exactly the point it has done its work.
The rest of the team filters in around us.
The forwards loud, the defense slower to wake.
Rocco in the middle, setting the temperature, which is a captain’s whole job.
I am on the ice with all of them and apart from all of them.
This is not new. This is the arrangement.
I keep the net and they keep the noise and it works.
The shooters line up. I take them. I am where I am supposed to be. The job, entire. Being where I am supposed to be. The men with notebooks come to buy nothing else. There are men with notebooks this year, or there are not. You play every rep as though the page is open.
Rocco runs a breakout drill. The defense moves on his voice.
Wyeth Stack goes over the boards a half-beat before Rocco calls for him, because Rocco was never going to have to call for him.
Three years on the same pair does that to two men.
They change without looking. Their whole language has about four words in it and they have never needed a fifth.
“Reverse,” Rocco says.
Wyeth is already reversing. Then, a beat late, to no one in particular: “Was going to anyway.”
“I know.”
I take what the drill spits out at the net.
A point shot through a screen. I do not see the puck leave.
I see the lane close and I close with it.
Save. A tip off the far post. I take it in the chest and smother it before the rebound can become a chance.
Save. This is the work. Not the highlight.
The next one, and the next one, made the same, until the same is a thing a man in the seats can lean his whole report on.
Then it is Fortin’s turn in the far net. I make the mistake again.
I watch him.
He is loose where I am sealed. He flops, he scrambles, he throws his whole body across the crease with no economy at all. He talks the whole time. To the shooters. To himself. To the puck. A goalie who narrates his own net.
Rocco passes him at the blue line without turning his head. “Fortin. You think the puck can hear you?”
“It hears me fine. It’s scared of me.”
“It’s not.”
Half of it is bad. A coach’s nightmare. He gives up his feet before the shot declares. He chases the fake and pays for the real one. The kind of goaltending that gets a boy scored on in ways he will see again at night. The other half.
The other half I do not have the word for.
A defenseman walks the line and slides a puck down for a one-timer.
It is a goal. It is already a goal. I have conceded it in my own body from across the ice.
Fortin is there. Early. Wrong, by every book, committed to a read the play had not yet declared.
The read is right. His glove is full of a puck that should be in the net.
He laughs. At his own save. Like it surprised him too.
The young ones down the bench bang their sticks on the boards for him.
He is not better than me. Let me be clear, in my own head, where no one can hear me be this small. He is not better than me.
He is only harder to find. I have spent my life becoming the most findable thing on a sheet of ice. The save that is always exactly where the save was. Here is a boy who is never where you left him. Down the bench the young ones watch him like weather no one forecast.
The drill has moved on without me. A shooter is set at the top of my crease, waiting on a goalie looking the wrong way down the ice.
I find my angle late. I make the save because I always make the save.
But I made it a half-step behind myself.
Half a step is the whole distance between the man in the book and the man they close the book on.
Sowa says nothing. He does not have to. He saw me watch the boy. He watches me not-watch the boy for the rest of practice. That is its own kind of comment.
In the tunnel after, he holds the door with one glove and lets the room go past him, and waits until I am the last one through.
“You saw the glove save.”
“Everybody saw it.”
“Everybody is not a goalie.” He lets it sit. He lets everything sit, long enough that I have to stand in it. “A man watches a thing because he is afraid of it or because he wants it. There is no third reason.”
“There is. Scouting.”
“That is the first two wearing a coat.”
He goes up the tunnel ahead of me and does not wait to see whether it landed. He never waits. He puts a thing down where you will trip over it later and lets the tripping do the teaching.
I reset. Glove up. Blocker square. I say the small silent piece of the order a crease will hold. I stand inside it. The settled feeling comes.
Slow. It comes slow.
I do not look at him again.
I look at him again.
* * *
I live in the Stable, like the rest of them.
Pelletier Hall on the housing paperwork, though nobody in this building has called it that since before I got here.
A cinderblock room. A bed. A desk. A shelf.
At home the order is smaller and no one sees it.
That is the point. Books upright. Spines out.
The lamp squared to the corner of the desk.
I set my day down piece by piece, the way I set my gear. The room holds it, and I hold.
The north wall is thin. This is new. This year it is thin in a particular direction.
Music comes through it. Low. A thread of it. It comes off him everywhere. I lie in the dark with the order complete around me. I wait for the music to become a thing I have to manage. An intrusion. A stick dropped in the middle of the sequence.
It does not become that.
It stays low. It stays on his side. It fills the thin place between us. Water into a crack. I lie very still and I do not name the noticing. Naming it would be moving the glove.
Before I sleep I do what I do every night.
I run the order in my head and put the day away behind it.
Glove. Blocker. Chest. Pads. Mask. The room holds.
Tonight there is a new piece at the end of the sequence that I did not put there.
A thread of sound through a thin wall. I don’t know when it got added.
I only know the sequence is not finished without it.
That frightens me more than a dropped stick ever has.
Everything about him comes slow, and arrives anyway. That’s the part I cannot square.