Chapter 22
Casimir
Rock bottom has a scoreboard. I know, because I am reading ours. It is telling me a true thing. In the only language I have ever fully trusted. The language of the number that does not lie.
We lose. Then we lose the next one. The team that was rolling starts to skid.
It skids for a reason that is never printed anywhere, and is understood by everyone.
A room feels a goalie war in its spine even when nobody names the war.
It feels the two of us not sitting together at the Trough.
It feels the separate elevators, the careful choreography.
Two men taking the long way around each other.
Through a building that is not big enough for it.
It feels the thing that welded this room around the winning come apart.
Along the exact seam where he ends and I begin.
You can watch it happen if you know where to look.
A defenseman hesitates a half-beat before he throws his body in a lane.
A team that trusts its goalie plays in front of him without thinking.
This team has stopped being able to not think about its goalies.
The forwards grip their sticks tighter. The freshmen go quiet.
Rocco tries. He is the moral center of this room.
He can feel the poison in it. He works it as he works everything.
With weight, with the tap on a shin guard, with three sentences and no clichés.
But a captain can only weld so much. You cannot weld a crack you are not allowed to name.
No one is allowed to name this one. The crack is a thing that happened in a gray room with a door shut on it.
The scout closes his notebook. He came to see one thing, and the senior is in a suit on the bench with a healed leg, so the man with the little book grades the goalie who is actually out there.
That goalie is coming apart. Two nights running, soft ones, the kind that live on film forever.
A boy who was reading plays before they declared is a half-beat behind everything now.
That is what closes a notebook. Not the drama in the room.
The soft goal on the tape. But the drama in the room is the whole reason it is on the tape at all.
My spring goes gray and his is going gray beside it and I am the one who did that.
I set out to protect my net, my showcase, my one clean thing, my door, and I came apart doing it and took him apart on the way down.
A man defending a house does not usually think to check whether he is the fire.
I keep the order anyway. There is nothing else left to keep.
I set gear I am not using on a shelf. In a room where no one sees it.
I touch the corner, two fingers, once. The sentence finishes and settles nothing at all.
At night the thin place in the wall is silent.
No thread of music comes through it. Somewhere in the good stretch of nights I built him into the order without permission.
I made his low sound a station on the way to sleep.
Now the station is dark and has been dark for weeks.
I lie inside a complete order and do not sleep.
Which is the precise thing the order was built to end.
I am back where I started. The winter I stopped sleeping come around again.
Except this time I know the name of the thing.
The thing on the other side of the wall.
I’m the one who put it out there in the cold.
Bruno finds me.
Finding me isn’t the hard part. He is in this building every day now, behind the bench with a headset on, which is a thing I still haven’t got used to.
The hard part is that somebody told him where to look on an off day.
Vinh sees things. Vinh has always seen things.
Vinh loves me in the sideways way this whole team loves me.
From a respectful distance, hands where I can see them.
So on an off day, when he has no earthly reason to be down here, Bruno turns up at the barn.
The building is empty and lit to the work set.
Half of what a game gets. Every sound in it goes up into the rafters and does not come back down.
A pipe knocks somewhere high and I hear the whole length of it.
I am on the bench pretending to stretch a leg.
A leg that has been fine for a while now.
It is somewhere to be that is not my room and not the shelf.
He comes down the tunnel with the unhurried walk.
The walk of a man who doesn’t play anymore and has made his peace with the bench he stands behind instead.
He does not ask if he can sit. He sits. He drops onto the bench next to me, this big man in a team jacket with no number on it.
He used to drop the gloves against the whole league.
On other people’s behalf. For a stretch he says nothing at all.
Neither do I. It is the least uncomfortable silence I have shared. With a human being who is not Sowa.
Then he talks. He looks out at the empty ice while he does it, not at me. Which is a kindness. It lets me not arrange my face.
“You know what I did when I finally let Vinh in?” he says.
“Tried to protect him so hard I nearly lost him.” He turns his hands over and looks at the knuckles that used to do his talking for him.
“Made myself the wall. Figured nothing could get past me to the soft thing behind it. Took me way too long to work out the soft thing was the point.” He gives that a moment to land. “You sleeping, Cas?”
I do not answer him. Bruno never needed the other guy to talk. That is half of why I can sit next to him. He learned it, I think, in a lot of hours on a roster with me. A quiet man and a man who did not mind quiet.
“He’s not scouting you, Cas.” Quiet. He stands as he says it.
The way you stand to leave a thing where it can be picked up later.
“A guy who’s scouting you takes the shot.
He’s got you dead every night and he takes it and he doesn’t look back.
Everybody in this building watched that kid not take it.
Over and over. You’re the only man alive who read that as proof he’s going to. You hear how that sounds?”
He puts his hand on my shoulder. Big and warm and easy, the whole flat weight of it. The way he lays a hand on a guy without making it a whole event. The way I watched him lay a hand on the back of Vinh’s neck in the Trough. While a whole team declined to blink.
“Somebody got all the way in,” Bruno says.
“And you’re standing there working out how to brick the door back up with him still inside it.
” He squeezes once. “I know the move, brother. Who do you think ran it first? Don’t be me for a whole extra season.
It’s the worst year you’ve got. Don’t spend it. ”
I want to tell him he doesn’t understand.
That his wall was gloves and fists. A thing he could drop on the ice and pick up when he chose.
That mine is older, deeper, load-bearing.
That mine is not a habit but the floor I stand on.
I want to tell him the order is not a thing a man just sets down.
It got a sleepless boy through to morning.
One plate at a time. But I do not say any of it.
It is a lie, or half of one. The half I have hidden behind all season.
The order got me through. The wall is what I added on top, later, brick by brick, out of fear.
I know exactly which bricks I laid this year.
I know exactly whose face is on the other side of every one of them.
Then he goes. On the way past he knocks the back of his knuckles against the top of my head, light, a thing you would do to a kid, and he does not apologize for it and he does not explain it.
He walks up the tunnel and back to the other end of the building, where his work is now.
He leaves me on the bench with the feel of it still there, which I understand is the whole point.
Bruno has never left a room without leaving a hand somewhere in it.
The two truest men I have known both saying the same thing. In different accents.
Sowa is right about the not-touching. He has never laid a hand on my shelf, and I trusted him for it. Bruno is right about the door. I sit in the empty barn a long time. I do the thing I have avoided my entire life. With a discipline I usually save for pucks. I look straight at my own gap.
He would not take the shot. All season he had me.
All season he never once used the thing I gave him.
I handed him the middle of me. What came into the house anyway, with the whole order standing straight against it.
He took it and kept it careful, both hands.
The way you carry a thing that could break.
He had every chance a man could ask for.
To spin the bottle and move the glove and go up the middle.
Instead he reached over the boards, once, in the middle of a game.
He set my label out. Because he could see from the bench that I needed it.
I accused him of gathering me like ammunition.
And then, in a gray room, I gathered him.
I used a whole season of learning him to find the one seam in him.
The being-second, the never-chosen, the thing under his noise.
I fired straight up the middle of it, on purpose, aiming.
I did to him the exact thing. The thing I stood there and accused him of being incapable of not doing.
That is the shape of it when I make myself look.
The difference between us is not that he is soft and I am strong.
The difference is that when I found his soft spot, I shot it.
When he found mine, he laid his body across it, and asked for nothing back.
Because I was the one who couldn’t stand to be the soft thing. Bruno had my number before he ever sat down.
Sowa said a thing to me in a room with no net in it and I have carried it around since without once opening it. I open it here, in an empty barn, with nobody to perform steadiness for. He was not warning me about the order. He was warning me about what I have been building on top of it.
Spokój. Babcia had the settled feeling and she taught me the order so I would have it too when she was gone.
I have run it clean all season. Complete, every sentence finished, each piece square to the next.
And I have not had one hour of the peace.
Because the peace was never in the shelf.
She did not keep that house safe with plates.
She kept it safe by making it a place a person could be held in, and the plates were only the language she said it in.
I took the language and threw away the person.
I threw away the one man who ever held the roof up with me, and I did it to protect the roof. It was only ever built to keep him out.