Chapter 4
Casimir
Sowa keeps me after.
He works the goalies to the last, and then he keeps me after the last, and I stay. Tomasz Sowa is the only man in this building who knows what the shelf is for. He is Polish the way I am Polish. A generation off the boat. The accent still a stone he carries in his cheek.
He was not always here. There were seasons in this program before him, when the goalies were a thing the staff got to on Thursdays if there was ice left, and nobody in the room knew what a crease costs a man.
I do not like to think about them. Then one fall he was standing at the end of the bench with a bucket of pucks, and he has been standing there every fall since, and the whole position in this building changed shape around him without anybody announcing it.
When he took over the goalies he watched me set my gear for a week and said nothing at all.
Not how the team watches, sidelong, half a joke already loaded.
A man watching a thing he recognizes. On the last morning of it he came and stood at the end of my stall while I set the gear.
He did not speak. He did not reach for anything.
He did not ask me to hurry. He let the sentence finish.
Then he nodded, once, the way you nod at a job done right, and said it quiet, in Polish, so the room could not have it.
You keep the order. I said it back to him. He walked away.
He has never touched the shelf. Not once, in all the mornings of us.
Proof of love, the only kind I trust. The not-touching.
Everyone I have ever let close wanted, in the end, to fix me.
My mother wanted it, gently, as you want weather to change.
A counselor a school made me see wanted it with forms. A boy once, years back, wanted it with his hands on my gear.
He moved a pad to show me the world would not end.
The world did not end, but a thing between us did.
Sowa only wants me to keep the order and stop pucks.
Those are the same wanting. I have never known how to answer any other wanting.
So he keeps me, and we work angles in the empty end while the building drains and the seats go dark in banks.
He fires pucks off a stick from the top of the circle.
Unhurried. Watching more than shooting. I take them and put them where a save puts them.
The pucks make their flat crack off my pads and die.
Every so often he changes the angle without a word, just to see me find it.
I find it, and he nods and does it again.
The conversation, all of it. Two men and a bucket of pucks and the seats going dark in banks above us.
Neither of us says much. It’s why I can stand him.
There is a kind of man who fills a silence because the silence scares him.
Sowa is the other kind. So am I. It is a small country, ours, and it has two citizens.
Then he leans on the crossbar and looks at me with the face of a man who has decided to say a true thing out loud.
“This is the year they watch you.”
I know. I do not say I know. Saying I know would be a word spent. I have started to guard my words the way I guard the shelf, ever since the boy taught me they could be picked up off the floor and kept.
“There’s a man coming through. More than one, before the winter is out.
They come for the seniors, the ones with a spring still in the legs.
They sit high and they write it down.” He taps the bar with one gloved knuckle.
“You know what they buy? Not the save that ends up on the screens. The save you make the same in the first period of a nothing game as you make in the last minute of a final. They’re not paying for one good night.
They’re paying for the next ten years of them. ”
“I know how to be consistent.”
“I know you do.” He says it plain. Then he lets a pause sit, which he does when the next thing is the one that matters.
“Consistency in an empty room is a habit. Consistency in a loud one? That’s a nerve.
They’re buying the nerve.” He fires another puck.
I take it clean. “You’ve got the habit. Nobody in this conference has it like you.
The habit’s what got you the little brass thing at center ice. ”
“But.”
“But a scout doesn’t watch the habit. A scout watches what the habit does when a boy is standing on your paint asking whether it holds.
” He straightens. Looks at me a moment past what the sentence needs.
“You know how to be consistent when the room lets you,” he says.
“The room is about to stop letting you.”
He does not say the name. He does not have to. We both hear the door at the far end, and the little thread of music that comes in ahead of the boy, as it always does.
Fortin is back on the ice.
Of course he is. The one hour of the day I have carved out of the building for myself, and he has found it.
A draft finds the one window nobody ever sealed.
Everyone here knows the hour is mine. Nobody else has ever once decided that made it a thing worth turning up for.
He did, the same way he has learned everything else about me this season.
By standing too close and paying a kind of attention no one has paid me since my grandmother.
He is not meant to be here. Practice is done.
The Zamboni is turning over in its bay, coughing to life, filling the far end with its low animal idle.
This last hour is mine. The hour I go post to post alone in the quiet and lay the day’s final course.
Brick on brick, until the order is whole and I can carry it home in one piece.
It’s one of the things simply known here, the way the shelf is.
Like where the cold spots are. Like which board is dead.
The building is a different animal empty.
The lights drop to the work set, half of what a game gets.
The cold comes up out of the concrete now that there are no bodies to hold it down.
You can hear the building talk to itself.
A pipe knocking somewhere high. The compressors under the ice keeping the sheet hard.
I like it here like this. No one to be apart from.
Just the net, and the order, and the sound my pads make when I go down.
Nothing else sounds in the place, so I hear it clean.
Post to post. Down, sealed, up. The ridge of my crease worn into the ice where a thousand of these have gone before.
I lay the day’s last course and the barn holds still for me. It never holds still with people in it.
This hour is not superstition. I want that understood, if only by me.
This hour is the tax I pay so the game can be free.
If I lay the last course clean tonight, tomorrow I do not have to think.
Tomorrow the body knows. A goalie who has to think has already lost. So I do the thinking now, alone, in the cold, where it costs nobody but me.
He skates a lazy loop past my net with his stick across the back of his shoulders like a yoke. Grin already loaded.
“Don’t mind me,” he says. “Getting my reps. Backups need reps. It’s in the handbook.”
“There is no handbook.”
“There should be. Who do I see about that?” He does not wait. “Chapter one, know your role. Chapter two, get more reps than the guy in chapter one.”
“Chapter three,” I say, because he has pulled it out of me before I can stop it. “Leave.”
He grins wider, delighted, like I have handed him something. That’s the trouble with giving him a word. He hoards them. He counts the ones I spend on him the way I count the pieces on the shelf. “He speaks. Write it down. Wrobel told a joke.”
“It was not a joke.”
“It had a shape like one.” He coasts to a stop at the top of my crease. Right at the paint. Skate blades kissing the blue. Close enough that I feel the border of the thing get stepped on. He looks down into my net like it is a room he is measuring for furniture.
Sowa says something in Polish, dry, about God giving a man patience and children to spend it on. He leaves us to it. He gathers his pucks into the bucket, slow, and goes up the tunnel. I will remember that he left us to it.
“You are in my crease.”
“I’m near your crease.”
“You are in it.”
“Semantics.” He rocks a blade against the paint, testing it, a boy toeing a line his mother drew on the floor. “Big fancy word for a guy who can’t bear a glove on the wrong shelf.”
He looks down at his own skates, at the blue paint underneath them, and then back up at me. He does not move them off it.
“Huh,” he says. “Would you look at that?”
There is the thing I will not name. He is standing where a man cannot stand, doing the one thing you do not do to a goalie.
A crease is not a suggestion. It is the one square yard a goalie owns outright.
The one place on a sheet of shared ice that is sovereign.
Every man in this game learns it before he learns to skate backward.
You do not enter another goalie’s crease.
You do not touch his water bottle. You do not move his gear.
He knows all three. He does them anyway, one at a time, like a boy testing which fence has the current in it.
Treating the net like ground we share. The right answer is fury, and the fury comes.
It does. But it comes with something riding it.
The look from the equipment room. The high shut window and the light that moved.
I hold still. I am good at holding still. It is most of what I am.
“Move.”
“There it is,” he says, soft, like I have proven a point he was making to himself. “Was starting to think you didn’t have a pulse.”
“Move.”
He holds my eyes. Past the point where anyone holds mine.
Past the point where I let anyone. I feel the hold land in my chest like a flat palm pressed there.
He knows I feel it, because the grin goes quiet on his face.
Something comes up under it that is not a joke at all.
For one moment neither of us is playing the part.
He is not the noise and I am not the wall.
We are only two goalies alone in a cold barn, standing too close, and the quiet between us is doing the loud thing his music usually does.
Then he steps back off the paint. Easy. Like leaving was his idea in the first place.
“See you tomorrow, Wrobel.” He skates off backward so he can keep the grin on me the whole way.
He nearly clips the far post and does not look to check.
He knows where it is. He knows where everything is.
It’s the one thing we have in common, and I hate that we have it in common.
A man who knows where everything is should know better than to stand where he stood.
The music goes with him up the tunnel, thinning as he goes, until the barn is only the barn again. I wait for the quiet to put itself back the way it was. It does not, quite. He has left a shape in it.
I stand in my crease. My own. The one square yard of this building I am entirely sure of. I do not lay the last course of the day.
I go home with it a brick short.
A brick short does not sound like much. It is much.
The order is only as whole as its last piece.
Tonight the last piece is missing. Where it should be there is a boy on his skates at the top of my crease, saying would you look at that.
I carry the gap home with me. I set the room down piece by piece and the room holds.
The day does not. A name is a door. I have spent my whole life keeping the doors shut.
I do not say his, even in the dark, even to myself.
I lie in the dark and run the order and it does not close.
I get up. I check the shelf. Books upright, lamp squared, everything where everything goes.
I lie back down. It still does not close.
This is the oldest fear I have, dressed in new clothes.
The fear that one night the order will be perfect and it will not be enough, and there will be nothing left to straighten, and the thing will come in anyway.
I do not sleep. Not how a man sleeps who finished the sentence. The shelf is fine. I checked it. I checked it again. It is fine, and it was never going to be the shelf.
It is that somewhere down the hall there’s a boy who has decided I am a thing with a window in it. He is not wrong. I have given my whole life to making sure no one ever got to be right about that.