Chapter 6
Casimir
Opening night. Non-conference. A nothing game by the standings.
Which makes it the opposite of a nothing game, because Sowa’s voice is in the back of my skull now, where the weather lives.
They are buying the next ten years. Somewhere up under the lights there is a man with a notebook, or there is not.
The not-knowing is the whole discipline of it.
You play every night as if the page is open and the pen is uncapped.
I keep the order. The shelf. The two fingers.
The sequence clean and unbroken. I set each piece square to the next and I do not hurry and I do not think.
For the length of it the boy through the wall is not in the sequence, because the sequence is the one place I have kept him out.
The settled feeling comes at the right distance for the first time in a week.
I carry it out onto the ice like a cup filled to the lip.
I do not spill it in the tunnel. I do not spill it at the anthem.
The barn is full tonight, and a full barn is a different cold than an empty one.
It is warmer and it is worse. The noise is a weather I have to stand under all night without letting it reach me.
I know how to be the still thing in the middle of the loud thing.
It is most of the job. It is most of me.
In the room before, the team makes its noise. Music. Tape tearing. Someone’s cleat heel drumming the floor. Then Rocco stands, and the noise goes out of the room the way water goes out of a tub.
“Nobody’s watched us play yet. Not them, not the paper, not you.” He gives the room exactly as long with it as the room needs. “So go find out.”
He sits down. The speech, complete. Three sentences and no clichés, and he does not raise his voice, because he never raises his voice, and the room is heavier after it than it was before.
Coop bounces a ball off the wall in the rhythm he has kept since the second round. Off the wall, off the floor, into his hand. Off the wall, off the floor, into his hand.
“Coop.”
“Don’t.”
“I have not said anything.”
“You looked at the ball.” He does not miss a beat of it. “Nobody looks at the ball.”
No one tells him to stop. If Coop stopped, we’d lose.
I do not think anyone else even hears it anymore.
I hear it. His rhythm has folded itself into mine since the first night he did it, without either of us deciding it should.
It is the one order I let another man hand me, and only because he does not know he is handing it.
Then I am gone. Mask down. Inside the place I go, where the crowd is only weather and the score is only a rumor, and there is the next shot and the angle it will arrive on and nothing else.
For most of the night I am where I am supposed to be.
It is honest hockey, the kind that never makes the screens.
I make the save the same way. The same way.
The same way. A shot from the point, taken high and swallowed.
A wrister off the rush, gloved and held for the whistle so the boys can change.
A goalie who shows up on the highlights has already had a bad night by definition.
The highlight is the goal he should not have needed to make.
I want to be the most boring man in the building.
For the man in the seats, if there is one.
For the spring. For the door at the end of all of it, the one the order was always secretly the key to.
Somewhere in the second, without meaning to, I know exactly where Fortin is on the bench.
Down the far end, where they plant the backup.
I do not look. I do not have to look. I have started to carry a sense of him the way I carry the location of the posts.
I do not remember agreeing to that, and there’s no time in a hockey game to argue with yourself about it.
A breakaway in the first. A boy comes down clean off a bad change.
The bench behind me goes quiet. A bench goes quiet like that when it has stopped being able to help.
I do not chase him. That is the young goalie’s death, the chase.
I let him come. I make myself the last still thing on a sheet of moving ice.
I give him nothing to read, no lean, no early drop, only a wall and the small dark gap the wall pretends to leave.
He tries to go five-hole, because they always try to go five-hole, because the gap is the story they have been told about goalies their whole lives.
There is nothing there. I have sealed it before he shot it.
The puck dies in my pads. The barn makes its sound and I do not hear it, not really, it reaches me as pressure and not as noise.
I am already resetting. Glove up. Blocker square. The next one.
Then, midway through, the building turns on me.
I have thought about how to explain this to a person who is not a goalie, and I have never managed it.
Everyone else on the ice can be a half-second wrong and skate it off.
A defenseman misreads a play, and there is a backchecker, and there is me.
I am the last thing. There is no one behind me but a red light and eighteen hundred people who will make a sound I will hear in my sleep.
So the building is not scenery to me. The building is a body I have to keep calm.
When it behaves, I do not notice it. When it does not, it can reach all the way into the crease and put its hand on the back of my neck.
There is a thing that happens. A horn from the wrong bench. A scoreboard that lies for a moment. A sound that lands out of sequence. It is nothing. It is truly nothing. It takes one shift of me clean off the board.
The horn goes when no horn should go. It comes up out of the wrong side of the building and my body answers before my head can call it off.
My body lunges for an order that is not on the ice to hold.
For one shift I am not the wall. I am a man in forty pounds of gear who has lost his place in the sentence.
Their top line reads it the way sharks read a change in the water, and they come.
I am guessing. I am late. I am every single thing I have spent my life refusing to be.
Two shots I do not so much save as survive. One caroms off my shoulder and over. One I smother by luck, not by craft, my glove finding it like a drowning hand finds a rope by accident. The crowd does not know the difference. I know the difference. The difference is the whole of me.
The third one goes in.
A wrister from the top of the circle. Nothing on it.
The kind I have eaten ten thousand times without thinking about it after.
My glove is late because my glove is still listening for a horn.
The puck goes under it and the light comes on and the wrong side of the building gets the sound it wanted.
It is a soft goal. There is no other word for it and I do not go looking for one.
We survive the rest of the shift. A whistle.
A stoppage. A defenseman flat on the ice with his body in the lane, because the goalie could not be trusted with it.
He gets up slow. He taps the puck to the ref and skates to the bench.
He does not look at me. That is its own mercy and I know it.
There is a code. You do not stare at the goalie after you have covered for him.
You let him find his own way back. Even that kindness is a way of saying he saw me fail.
I know what that is. A teammate spending his body to close a hole I left open. For them I am supposed to be one thing. The last certainty. The floor that does not give. For one shift I was not it. I feel the not-it in my chest like a missed stair in the dark.
I skate to my crease to reset. I already know the order is not here to be found. The order lives on the shelf and the bench and the sequence, not in the middle of a period with the clock still bleeding.
And the water bottle is turned wrong.
Nothing. A nothing thing. But it sits on top of the net with the label out, always.
That is part of it. In the scramble a stick or an elbow spun it, and the label is to the back now.
My eye snags on it and my chest does the thing.
The floor-tips thing. The unfinished-sentence thing.
I am at the worst possible moment to be a man who cannot let a label sit wrong.
Before I can get a glove up to it, a glove gets there first.
Fortin. Leaned over the boards from the bench.
He rights the bottle, label out. Then he squares the towel the way I square the towel.
Then he touches the top corner of the boards, two fingers, once.
The way I do it. He drops back onto the bench and looks out at the ice like his hands were never anywhere near it.
He gave it back.
He knows the sequence. He has known it for days.
He has been gathering it piece by piece while I let him stand too close.
The one thing a person does with that knowledge, the exact thing I have braced against my entire life, is use it.
Spin the bottle. Move the glove. Find the gap and go up the middle.
He found it and he covered it with his body.
The settled feeling comes back. Not off the shelf.
Not out of the sequence. Off a boy on the bench who put my label out because he could see, from there, that I needed it.
The floor comes back up under me. The sentence, which had been hanging open and bleeding, finds its last word in the last place I would have looked for it. I did not put it there. He did.
I make the next save the way it is meant to be made.
Square, sealed, unhurried, boring. And the one after that.
The rest of the night I am the wall again.
Their top line reads it and quits coming up the middle.
We win the nothing game that is not a nothing game.
The horn at the end is the right horn, and I let it be the end of it.
In the room after, everyone is loud. Someone dumps a water bottle over someone’s head. Rocco is grinning, which he does about four times a year. He knocks two knuckles on the frame of my stall on the way past.
“You good?”
“I’m good.”
“Yeah?” He does not wait for it. That is how Rocco asks.
Sowa stops at the end of my stall on his way out. He does not sit. He does not sit down in this room and he never has.
“Twenty-four.”
“Twenty-four.”
“Two of them you survived. The rest you made.” He lets it sit. “A man in the seats cannot tell those apart. You can. So can I.”
“I know.”
“Good. Then we do not have to have the other conversation.” He puts his hand once on the top of my stall, on the wood, never on the gear, not once in all the mornings of us.
“Something put you back on your feet in the second. It was not the shelf. Whatever it was, do not go looking for it in daylight. You will only frighten it off.”
He leaves before I can work out whether I have been praised or warned.
I sit in my stall and I cannot make the thing balance.
You do not hand your rival his order back in the middle of a game.
It breaks every unwritten law of the work we do.
He wants my net. He has said it to my face, at the board, in ink.
Lists change. Then he leaned over the boards and steadied the one man standing between him and the top of the list. Who does that?
I turn it over in my hands the way I turn the blocker at the shelf, looking for the lace, looking for the wrong thing in it.
There has to be a wrong thing in it. Maybe it was for the team.
Steadying me steadies the score, so he did it for the two points and not for me.
It is a clean explanation. It does not fit what I saw when he sat back down.
He did not look at the score. He looked at me, and then he looked away and gave me the moment for nothing.
A man playing the two points does not do that.
I do not understand it. I do not like not understanding it. A variable I cannot understand is the entire definition of a threat.
I try to file him again. The old label. Fortin. Backup. Manage. It will not hold. You cannot file a man who reaches over the boards when the floor is going out from under you and hands you back your own order and asks for nothing. That is not a variable. A variable does not care whether you drown.
He catches me looking, across the room, half out of his gear.
He does not grin. That is what I take home with me.
Not the win. He only holds my eyes, the high window, and does not ask for anything with them.
Every kindness I have ever been shown came with a hand out afterward, wanting me fixed, wanting me open, wanting me easier to be near.
He wants nothing. He turns back to his skates and lets me have the moment to do with as I please.
Then Rocco says something to the room and it closes.
The noise folds back over us. I go home through the cold.
I check the shelf and the shelf is fine.
I run the order and it closes tonight, the first clean close in a week, and I should be able to sleep on it.
I do not, for a while. I lie in the order with the win under me and I try to file the boy one more time and the file will not shut.
It is not the shelf. I know by now it is never going to be the shelf.