Chapter 7
Emile
Team night at the Hitch is a rite, not a plan.
Nobody calls it, nobody texts a time, the season just turns a certain way and the whole roster drifts toward the same low door on the same night, because water knows which way a floor tilts.
You end up there. And you’ve always ended up there, you will end up there, right up until they hand you a diploma and point you at the highway.
Denny Plourde is behind the bar, where he has been since he graduated, a fourth-liner who never left the mountain and now pours for the guys who took his spot.
There’s a horseshoe nailed over the door older than anybody currently standing under it.
The paint on the sign has given up in patches and none of it has ever mattered a day in its life.
What matters is the room. It decides who’s all right and who isn’t and it takes its sweet time about it, and Denny pours to the verdict, because Denny stood on the wrong side of that verdict himself and has never pretended otherwise.
An athlete earns a nod across a couple of seasons or he doesn’t, and I’m somewhere in the back half of earning mine.
And some things you should have to earn.
The door sticks. It always sticks, you have to put a shoulder in it like you mean it, so I mean it. The warm hits me first, fryer grease and old wood, the particular smell of a room that’s been keeping people warm through bad winters longer than any of us have been alive.
“Fortin,” Denny says from behind the bar. From Denny that’s a marching band.
“Denny. You miss me?”
“Nope.”
“You will.”
He pours the thing he’s decided I drink without asking, which is its own kind of nod, then slides it down the wood so it stops exactly in front of me, which it always does, like the bar is on his side.
I carry it to the back where the team always ends up.
There’s a deer head on the wall back there, and some dead genius put a Renegades cap on it before I was born.
Nobody’s ever taken it down. You don’t take down scripture.
The place is low-ceilinged, warm, half full of the town.
Guys off shifts still in their work coats, a pair of old-timers at the rail who’ve been coming since long before Denny was ever behind it.
They don’t bother us, we don’t bother them, that’s the treaty.
It’s a good treaty. I have yet to see it broken.
There’s a game on the little TV wedged up over the bottles, some pro team nobody in here pulls for, and half the guys are half-watching it while they argue about it anyway.
Which is the correct amount of attention for a team you don’t care about.
Girard’s at the shuffleboard teaching a freshman the puck.
And the freshman is hopeless. Girard is patient about it in his nine-words-a-season way, nudging the kid’s elbow down, tapping the line he wants, never spending a syllable he doesn’t have to.
“So what’s the secret?” the kid asks him.
Girard weighs it like it costs money.
“Aim better,” he says.
The kid nods like he got handed scripture.
Denny works the length of the bar without ever looking rushed, refilling a glass before you’ve noticed it’s empty, reading the whole room the way Casimir reads a rush. Everything at once. Nothing showing on him. A freshman makes the mistake of ordering something with a name in it.
“You got anything with, like, mint in it?”
Denny looks at him until the words die in his mouth.
The kid orders a beer. Denny pours the beer.
He does not ask the kid anything, and he never has, not of any of us.
Somebody poured for Denny across this same wood when he was the one ordering, back when he was still a fourth-liner in this program and two years from standing where he stands, and a man does not take a thing like that and then get careful with it.
He has been waiting his whole time back here to hand it on.
I sit there with the drink he decided on, thinking that this is the nearest thing I’ve got to a living room.
My mother would love it here. Manon would take one look at Denny and adopt him.
Wyeth Stack is down the wood with a plate in front of him, which is a trick, because this bar does not serve food.
He came in carrying a foil pan under one arm and set it on the bar without a word, and Denny put it under the heat lamp without a word back, and now half our table is eating pie nobody ordered and nobody is going to pay for.
Wyeth’s people run the kitchen at Stack’s, the diner up the road where the team eats breakfast and Bev holds the counter like a defensive zone.
They’ve been feeding this town longer than anybody in here has been drinking in it.
“Your mother send this?” Denny says.
Wyeth thinks about it. Our defenseman thinks about everything, and he takes the same amount of time over all of it, whether it’s a two-on-one or a question about pie.
“Bev,” he says finally. “She said you looked thin.”
“I look the way I have always looked.”
“That’s what she said.”
Denny cuts himself a slice with the air of a man conceding a point he does not intend to acknowledge out loud.
Over at the pool table Harlan and Kaspar are running the thing they run.
Kaspar calls a shot he has no business calling, two rails and a prayer, and doesn’t say it out loud so much as tap the wood twice where he wants it to go.
Harlan sinks it. They’ve been doing this so long neither of them bothers celebrating.
Between shots they end up leaning on the same six inches of rail with their hands side by side on the wood, close enough that you’d have to be looking hard to find the daylight, and nobody in this bar is looking hard.
Somebody hollers at them to move it along because there’s a table waiting, and Harlan says something in Finnish that is definitely not about pool, and the room laughs and goes back to what it was doing.
That’s it. Nothing more to it. I turn my glass a quarter on the wood and file it somewhere I don’t have a name for yet.
Bruno’s here again, off the clock, out of the team jacket, on the town side of the job for once. And he’s here anyway on a team night because Vinh is here.
The two of them have washed up in a booth by themselves, which is what two guys do when the rest of the room is somebody else’s noise.
Bruno’s arm is along the back of the seat, Vinh’s fit up under it telling a story with the hand he’s got free, and there it is again, the thing I don’t have a word for in either language I own.
Two guys just letting themselves have it.
Out loud, in Denny’s bar, in front of the whole team, and the whole room lets them without making an event of the letting.
That’s the part that gets me. Not that they’re allowed.
That nobody in the building has decided it’s a thing to be allowed or not.
I think about a kid who stopped sleeping one winter, who built himself a chapel so it would never happen again, and I think about how far a chapel like that sits from an arm along the back of a booth. I do the math on the distance. I don’t like the number I get.
I don’t clock that I’ve been staring until Vinh catches me at it. He grins and tips his glass at me, small, like he knows something, which he probably does.
“What?” I say, loud enough to cover it. “You want my drink? Come take it.”
He lifts the glass a little higher instead of answering, which is worse than anything he could’ve said.
Vinh’s got an eye on him that misses nothing.
And lately he keeps pointing all of it at me.
So I turn my attention somewhere my face can behave.
There’s a lot of my drink left. I get busy with it, and I stay busy with it a good while.
Bruno comes back from the bar with two fresh glasses and stops at my stool.
He’s got no hand free for the usual, so he does the next thing, which is put his shoulder into mine and leave it there a second, all that weight, warm and unbothered.
He did that in a sweater. He hasn’t quit doing it in a headset.
“Fortin.”
“Calisse, Thibault. They still let you in here? Thought there was a rule in here about coaches. Thought there was a whole plaque about it up over the door, right next to the horseshoe.”
He tips his head toward the far end of the bar without looking at it. Toward the one guy in the room. Nobody else in this place would’ve clocked that I keep clocking him. “Go easy on him this year, eh?” He says it light, no weight on it. “He’s better than he lets anybody see.”
There’s nothing in it. It’s just a thing a good captain’s old enforcer says on his way past, a guy who spent his whole time here learning to see the quiet ones. But my face wants to do something, so I put a grin on it fast, before it can.
“Somebody’s got to keep him honest,” I say. “Ostie, I go easy on him, he starts thinking I’ve gone soft. And I don’t do soft, me.”
Bruno laughs, big and helpless, the whole-body laugh, then moves on back to his booth, to his Vinh and his easy warm life. I sit there wondering what a man learns to see about Casimir Wrobel across three seasons in the same room, and whether he even knows what he just handed me for free.
Somewhere else in the room is Casimir.
End of the bar by himself, which is where he always ends up, close to the room without ever joining it.
There’s a glass in front of him he isn’t drinking.
He isn’t watching the TV. He isn’t watching the shuffleboard.
He’s just sitting inside himself at the end of the bar, being the one still object in a room full of moving ones.
And I do the thing I do around him, the documented condition. I can’t not.
I bring my glass down the wood and lean on the bar next to him. Not too close. Close enough. Denny clocks it from the far end and pours something for a man who didn’t order it, which is Denny for I see you. And I’m staying out of it.
“You did a thing tonight,” I say.
He doesn’t look over. “I made twenty-four saves. I did a number of things.”
“The bottle.” I turn my glass a slow quarter turn on the bar, just to have something to do with my hands, because they want to do something dumb.
“You were rattled after the horn. Don’t bother arguing.
Nobody in that whole building saw it but me, and I’ve been watching you long enough now to catch it.
The horn went when no horn should go, your body went looking for a wall that wasn’t there, and for one shift you were a guy in the gear instead of the guy in the net.
Your bottle got spun backward in the scramble.
Label to the boards.” I let it sit. “And I fixed it.”
“I noticed.”
“You want to know why?”
“No,” he says.
Which is a lie, and we both hear that it’s a lie, sitting there between us on the bar. His trick, start to finish. He’ll hand you a lie so bald it’s basically a dare to call it. He wants you to. He’d never in a hundred years admit he wants you to.
So I call it.
I shift, just a little, just enough that my forearm on the wood comes up a breath from his forearm on the wood.
Not touching. A hair from touching. I feel him clock the hair.
I drop my voice under the noise of the room, under the TV and the shuffleboard, under Rocco laughing at something down the way, until it’s a thing that only exists in the eighteen inches between us.
“I fixed it because I want your net,” I say.
“I do. I want it so bad it keeps me up nights I’ll never cop to.
And I’m going to take it, fair, on the ice, this year.
I mean that. Every word. But I don’t want it because you came apart in the middle of a hockey game over a horn.
That’s not a net worth taking. I want it because I beat the best there is.
And how’s a guy the best there is if some idiot backup lets his bottle sit backward when he could’ve reached over the boards and turned it around?
” I let that hang too. Then, quieter, just for him, only for him. “So I turned it around.”
He turns his head.
Finally. He turns his head and looks at me, and we’re closer than I planned to end up.
Close enough that I can see it isn’t stone, never was.
It’s a man holding himself very still, and the holding costs him.
I can watch the cost sitting right there, high up, where I’ve learned the window is.
His eyes go over my face like he’s hunting the trap in it. There’s no trap in it. That’s the trap.
He doesn’t move away.
There it is. And my heart turns clean over.
He doesn’t move away. A man who lives and dies by keeping his exact measured distance from every moving body in a building lets me stand inside that distance, at a bar, in the Hitch, with half the town in the room.
And he doesn’t move. His eyes drop to my mouth, just for that breath, then come back up, and he knows I caught it.
I can see him know it. He still doesn’t move away.
“Fortin,” he says.
This time my name in his mouth isn’t a verdict.
He’s said it like a card he reads a penalty off of.
He’s said it like a door closing. He doesn’t say it like that now.
Now it’s a question he hasn’t decided whether he’s allowed to ask, and it comes out careful, like a man setting a glass down on a shelf he isn’t sure will hold.
“Yeah,” I say. Whatever it is. Whatever he’s asking. Yeah.
Then Rocco stands.
He stands at the head of the long table and calls the room to some toast, low and plain, no clichés.
Rocco does every last thing like that. The whole back of the bar turns toward him with glasses up, and it breaks like a stick across a shin.
The moment. The eighteen inches. Casimir straightens off the bar, putting the distance back between us inch by careful inch, and I let him, because there’s nothing else to do with twenty guys turning around.
I don’t hear one single word of the toast.
I find his eyes one more time across the room while everybody else is turned to Rocco, and he’s already looking at me.
We’ve done this since the equipment room on the first day, the two of us the only ones in a place not watching what everybody else is watching.
We call it rivalry, because rivalry is a word we both know how to hold on to.
It fits in the hand. You can carry it out of a bar without anybody asking what it is.
Here’s what I carry home instead. I lie awake on it, with a thin wall at my back and a saint asleep on the other side of it, his day set down in rows in the dark.
I wanted him to not move away more than I wanted the toast. More than the room. More than the win we got tonight. More than, for one whole breath at that bar, I wanted the net.
And wanting a single thing on this earth more than I want that net. That’s the most dangerous thing that’s ever happened to me.