Rafe
Chapter seven
The tunnel smelled of cold rubber and popcorn. Trier came up the ramp behind me with his suit bag over his shoulder.
“Two assists,” he said.
“Yep.”
“No goals.”
“Nope.”
“Six games. Six games, and tonight you decide to be a passer. In Dallas. Where my sister-in-law watches.”
“I didn’t decide anything. Cross was open.”
“Cross is always open. He’s a large man who stands in good spots.” He stopped at the bus door to let a trainer through with a case of tape. “My sister-in-law will text me about this, and I have nothing to say to her.”
“Tell her I’m sorry.”
“I will not tell her that.” He got on the bus.
It was close to midnight by the time I got to my hotel room, hung my suit, and put my shoes under the desk with the toes even. The group chat was busy: Trier’s catsitter shared a photo of the cat asleep inside one of Trier’s boots, and Varga announced he’d found the correct steakhouse in Winnipeg.
I brushed my teeth, set the alarm and the backup alarm, and turned the lamp off. Before rolling over for sleep, I pulled up the text I’d sent. I want to see the drawer. Thursday work? There was no response.
***
Monday morning, seven fifteen, waiting on the airport bus, I finally looked at the hotel bar. I’d walked past it four times.
The bar was made from a twelve-foot board with no seam in it anywhere. It was reddish-brown, close to the color of the sideboard in Niko’s shop.
It had stripes, too. The stripes were in the wood, not painted on.
They ran across the grain in bands about a finger wide, half dark and half light.
I took two steps to the left to get out of a bellman’s way, and the stripes reversed.
The dark ones went light and the light ones went dark, all the way down the board.
I stood there and moved back and forth like an idiot to make sure I’d seen it.
“Sir?”
“Sorry.” I got out of the way.
On the charter, I had my window over the wing, and the card game was starting in the back before the door closed. I pulled my phone out somewhere around ten thousand feet.
I started typing: hey, question about wood. saw a bar in the hotel lobby, one whole board, and the grain was in stripes, and when I moved the stripes
I read the words back and deleted them. It sounded like a man explaining why he was texting.
Trying again: random question but is there a reason wood would look striped and then
I deleted that, too. People only said random question when it wasn’t that.
Finally:
Rafe: Hotel bar in Dallas was one board, twelve ft, reddish. It had stripes running across the grain, light and dark. I moved two steps and every stripe flipped, dark to light. Is that a finish thing or is it in the wood?
I hit send.
The answer came in less than five minutes.
Niko: Not a finish. It’s in the wood. That’s ribbon stripe.
Niko: In most trees the fibers run one direction, up. In some species they spiral, and the spiral reverses itself every few years of growth. So you get a band that grew clockwise, then a band that grew counterclockwise, then clockwise. Interlocked grain.
Niko: When you quartersaw a board like that you cut across all those bands and expose them side by side.
Half the bands have their fiber ends pointed toward you and half have them pointed away.
The ones pointed toward you throw the light back.
The ones pointed away swallow it. That’s your light stripe and your dark stripe.
Move, and you change which half is pointed at your eye. That’s why they flipped.
Niko: It isn’t color. Nothing about the board changed. You did.
I read it twice.
Niko: Sapele, probably, or African mahogany.
That reddish brown and 12 ft with no glue line, somebody spent money.
It’s miserable to work. Half the board runs against you no matter which direction you push, so a hand plane tears it out every time.
You scrape it or you sand it and you make your peace.
Niko: And it’s on a bar for a reason. Ribbon only does that when someone walks past it. Hang it on a wall and it just sits there.
I don’t know what answer I expected to get.
Yes, that’s the wood most likely. Instead, Niko gave me a picture in my head of a tree reversing itself every few years for a hundred years, on the chance that somebody would eventually cut it the right way and put it in a hotel where people walked past every day.
The card game got loud enough over Kansas that Coach Markel turned around. Varga lost a hand he described as unlosable and came up the aisle to sit on my armrest.
He looked at my phone.
“You’re smiling at your phone,” he said.
I lowered the phone immediately, a stupid move, because it made it look like something.
“Max?” Varga said.
“No. His brother.”
Varga said nothing. He looked at me for about a second and a half.
“Huh,” he said.
Then he went back to the card game and accused Trier of cheating by face-timing with his cat for advice.
We approached Winnipeg, flying over ground I knew well: white and flat, sectioned into squares by the roads, with shelterbelts running along the north edge of every quarter the way they do at home.
The customs agent who took my passport looked at it and then at me and said his brother-in-law farmed by Nokomis, and that my dad was a hard man on a curling rink. I nodded and told him that was true.
At the hotel, I read Niko’s messages one more time.
I typed an answer.
Rafe: Ok so if half the board fights you no matter which way you push it, how do you cut a joint in something like that?
The Winnipeg arena was two-thirds full forty minutes before puck drop, and there was a hand-painted sign at the glass during warmups—MIKKELSEN, ROSEWOOD SASK—held up by a woman about my mom’s age.
She had two kids with her in coats zipped to the chin, and behind them, in a jersey with my number on it, cousin Dana’s Colton.
I signed the sign, asked Colton about his mom’s hip, and told the woman I’d tell my dad she said hello. Then the horn blew, and I was back to all my attention on hockey.
***
They came at us hard in the first, four of them in the corner at once, and Rook took a hit at our blue line that folded him into the boards. We were down by one after the first.
Second period, they gave us an entry to work with. They’d watched film, and they knew about the bump-back at the line. I came up the wall on my second shift, and their weak-side D was already cheating to the middle to take the pass away before I’d finished crossing the red line.
He was two strides early.
There was a lane, and it was closing. He’d committed his hips to a pass I hadn’t made yet, and there was a door standing open behind his shoulder where he used to be.
I cut inside him and got to the dot before he could turn around, and I had a look at the goalie’s far pad. I sent the puck there, and it ricocheted off the inside of the post into the net.
Cross got to me first and grabbed the back of my helmet. “Yeah,” he said. “That’s the read.”
On the bench, Coach Markel looked down the line at me and said, “Same look next time.”
We won three to two. Heath got the winner on a rebound with six minutes left. Rook blocked two shots in the last ninety seconds, and he got up slow after the second.
In the locker room afterward, Varga organized the van to the steakhouse. Trier read his sister-in-law’s post-game analysis of the Dallas contest aloud in an announcer voice, and I pulled my phone out of the cubby.
Mom had sent a picture of the television with my goal frozen on it and her thumb in the corner of the frame. Then I had messages from Mark.
Mark: Great goal. That entry read is going to be a clip they show in coaching seminars for the next ten years.
Mark: Small thing, no rush, and please read the whole message before you answer.
Mark: The Hendricks Foundation gala is February 14th.
Black tie, Palmer House, about 600 people, the whole city’s there.
They came to us this morning specifically asking for you and Max together.
It’s a good room and a good cause, pediatric cardiology, the thing the club’s been attached to for years.
Two hours, photos on arrival, one table, no speaking, home by ten.
Mark: It’s the 14th so I want to say out loud that we know it’s Valentine’s, and if that makes it feel like a lot, that’s a completely fine reason to say no. Would you be willing?
I read to the end of the fourth message.
Rafe: sure, happy to
Mark: You’re the best. Genuinely. I had a whole backup plan and I don’t need it.
Ten minutes later, while I was putting my equipment in my duffel:
Max: RAFE
Max: the 14th. the FOURTEENTH. do you understand what they’ve handed us
Max: no you don’t. that’s fine. that’s why I’m here
Max: I’m calling my tailor tonight. he’s going to be so angry with me and he’s going to do it anyway
I sent back a thumbs-up and finished packing. It was nothing. Two hours in a hotel ballroom for kids with heart conditions. It made me feel good to say yes.
The steakhouse did one thing and did it correctly, exactly as advertised. I got back to the hotel after midnight with my coat smelling like char, and I checked my phone in the elevator.
Niko: You cut it with a knife and a saw instead of a plane.
Sever the fibers before you remove them.
The tearout happens because you’re lifting fiber, so you cut the top of it first and then take the waste out underneath.
Slow. You can’t hurry a board like that, and you can’t muscle it either. It doesn’t care how strong you are.
I stood in the hallway outside my room, imagining the message in Niko’s voice. Then I went in, undressed, set the alarm, and lay there thinking about a man taking his time cutting boards.
***
The next morning we left Winnipeg through the little private terminal with frost on the inside of the windows. We’d be on the ground in Chicago a little after noon.
I had my headphones on and nothing playing when Trier sat down beside me. He had a coffee in each hand and gave me one.
“So the vet moved Peaches.”