Chapter 27
Casimir
The conference final comes down to a night in a barn. A barn that will not sit down.
We are in it. Deep in it. A one-goal game in a building louder than weather.
The banners shivering in the rafters. The noise quit being sound a while ago.
It turned into a pressure you feel in your teeth.
I know this pressure. I stood in this and gave a team one goal and not one thing more.
They handed me a little brass thing at center ice.
I held it out from my body like it might come alive.
That was a different man. That man was holding the roof up alone.
He did not know there was another way to do it.
My leg is under me. The order is set. I laid the last course of it in the empty end this morning, brick on brick, and carried it out here filled to the lip.
Somewhere up under the lights there is a man with a notebook.
He came all this way to see one thing. Whether the senior makes the save in the last minute of a final the same way he makes it in the first period of a nothing game.
Whether the wall is a wall when the whole season is standing on it.
I can. I have never been more sure of anything in my life.
Because I am not holding it up alone anymore.
This is Rocco’s last game too. He stands up in the room before and the noise drains out of it, a tub with the plug pulled.
“Four years,” he says. “That’s the whole thing. That’s all anybody gets.” He looks down the row at the freshmen, who are looking at the floor. “So don’t play like there’s another one coming.”
He sits down. That is the speech. He does not say the word last and he does not say the word me, because Rocco does not say things about Rocco.
The whole room knows it anyway, and the room plays like it.
Our captain out there on the blue line, low and wide and impossible to move.
Spending his body on every shift. The way he has spent it for four years.
Sowa is behind the bench with his arms crossed, and the stone in his cheek.
Fortin is down the bench in his gear, not playing, ready in case.
Doing the thing he does now. Watching me the way you watch weather you are on the right side of.
Before I skated out he put his two fingers on the boards.
Once. I felt it in my chest the whole first period. A hand on the roof beside mine.
I take what they bring and they bring all of it.
A point shot arrives through four sets of legs and I never see the release, only the lane narrowing, and I narrow with it, and the puck is dead against my chest before the screen has finished being a screen.
A tip skips off the far post and I am down on it in the same breath, smothered, buried, nothing loose left for anybody to build a season out of.
Then a bad change, and a boy alone with the puck, and the whole sheet open in front of him.
Let him come. Chasing is how the young ones die.
Everything out here is moving. I am the one object that is not.
He hunts the gap. They all hunt the gap, because five-hole is the story they have been told about goalies since they were small, and the story is old and the story is wrong.
The pads are shut. They were shut before he decided.
The barn does what the barn does and it arrives in my teeth as pressure and never as noise.
Back to the top. Glove up. Blocker square. Next.
They come in waves after that. Because a team down a goal in a final stops playing a system and starts playing a fever.
I take a slapper off the hip and steer it to the corner.
I take a scramble in tight. Two whacks at a loose puck in my paint.
I get a pad on the first and my blocker on the second.
Rocco arrives to eat the third body before it can arrive at me.
He taps my pads with his stick on his way back up the ice.
From Rocco that is a whole speech. I hear all of it.
The clock bleeds down. The barn will not sit. Every rush that dies in my glove, the noise climbs another floor. I stay under it, in the still place, where the crowd is only weather and the score is only a rumor. This is the man the notebook came to see.
Then the weather comes inside.
I could not put a moment on it. There is never a moment.
A horn goes over the far bench for a line change, for nothing, out of sequence, and my body answers it before my head can call it off.
The drums under the visitors’ end start and do not stop.
Eighteen hundred people get up on the seats behind the glass and the sound comes down onto the ice like water finding the low place.
The building puts its hand on the back of my neck. And it does not take it off.
A point shot through traffic dies in my glove and it is not clean.
Nobody in this barn can see that. The whistle goes, the boys change, the noise climbs.
I am the only man alive who knows I was a half-beat late to it and got paid anyway.
Then a wrister off the rush, and my glove goes out for an order that is not on the ice to hold.
I am reaching for a label turned out. For a towel squared.
For a shelf in a room three rinks from here.
So I go back to the top. Glove up. Blocker square. Run the sequence and let it close.
It does not close. I run it in my own paint with the barn coming down on me and it hangs open. The sentence with no last word in it. The floor-tips thing. I make the one move I have made my whole life to put the floor back under me, and the floor is not there.
The next shift shows me what that costs.
A shot from the wall with nothing on it, the kind I have eaten ten thousand times.
My glove goes for it a half-beat behind where my glove lives and it catches the heel and drops.
Then it is loose. Behind me. Spinning flat on its edge in my own blue with the whole open mouth of the net in front of it and my body turned the wrong way down the ice.
I do not have it. I do not know where it is.
I am down on the paint reaching backward with my glove open on nothing, and the barn pulls its breath in all at once, and I hear the breath and not the puck.
Wyeth Stack gets there. He comes off the far post with his stick flat to the ice and sweeps it off the line and up over the blue, no wasted motion in any of it, and then he skates away and does not look at me, because there is a code about that too.
The whistle goes somewhere up ice. The barn lets the breath out and turns it into a cheer. A building always turns a near thing into a cheer.
Rocco comes through my crease on his way to the change and does not slow down.
“Wrobel.”
“I know.”
“Freeze it next time.”
“I know.”
I stay down a moment longer than I need to.
That was a goal. On the board inside me where the score is actually kept, it is in. My glove was late and my body was turned and the wall came apart, once, in front of a full barn, and every soul in it saw a good play by a defenseman instead.
Nobody knows what that was. Not Marquette, who saw a scramble and a stick.
Not Rocco, who thinks I lost a puck. Not the man with the notebook, who is watching a goalie who has not been beaten.
The tape will not have it for another shift.
Then it will have it, and it will have it as a soft one from the top of the circle with nothing on it, under a glove that was still listening for a horn.
I have given that goal up before. I know its whole shape.
I can see it sitting out there. Weather sitting on a ridge.
And then, late, I make the choice.
There is a stoppage. A puck frozen against the far boards. The barn gulping air for the last push. My leg is under me. This is not the leg and it is not fear. I want to be exact about that, in my own head, where no one can hear me.
The count in my hands does not lie. It never has. It is the one thing I own that no coach gave me and no notebook can grade. And it is telling me the thing I have spent four years in this building making certain I would never have to say to a living person.
I skate to the bench.
Nobody understands it. Marquette least of all. He comes down the boards with his face open for the first time all year. “Wrobel. What. Are you hurt?”
“No.”
“Then get in your net.”
Here is where a man like me says nothing. Here is where a man like me goes back out and holds it alone and eats a soft one in the last minute of a final, and carries that into every room he stands in for the rest of his life. Because the other thing was a sentence he could not make his mouth do.
I make my mouth do it.
“I am gone,” I say. “The horn got in. It got in and it has not come out.”
“You haven’t been beaten all night.”
“I was late on the point shot and late on the wrister after it. Nobody saw it. I saw it. I will not get paid on the next one.”
“Everybody’s late. You play through it.” He is not open anymore. His face has gone back down flat and he is talking to me the way you talk to a goalie you intend to leave in. “It’s a final. It’s your final. You know who’s up there with a notebook.”
“I know exactly who’s up there.” I do. I have felt him the whole game. “The order is not closing. I have run it in my own paint and it hangs open. I know what comes next, because I have given it up before. It goes in from the top of the circle with nothing on it and it ends the season.”
He does not answer. Down the boards a defenseman turns his head to hear.
Let him hear.
“I am asking you,” I say.
Four years in this barn. I have never once put those words into the air. Not here, not in the building before it, not in the cinderblock house before that. My chest does not want to give them up. They come out anyway, in front of my coach and my captain and every boy on this bench.
“I am asking. Take me out. Put Fortin in.”