Rafe
Chapter twenty-three
I hadn’t known Heath would repeat what I had said. “Their third pair gets caught flat if you make them turn twice.”
“Louder.”
I cleared my throat and nearly shouted, “Their third pair can’t turn twice.”
“That’s the game plan,” Coach Markel said.
“That’s the whole thing. Everybody wants to beat that forecheck by outrunning it.
You can’t. You beat it by making them change direction, and then making them change direction again.
They lose it on the second one. East-west before north. Twice through, both units. Go.”
Rook had to pretend to be part of Minnesota’s third pair, and he hated it.
The drill only worked if he did his job, and that was getting beaten.
On my second time through, I took the puck across the top instead of up the wall, waited for his hips to commit, and brought it back against the grain.
He got one full turn in and half of a second one.
By then Heath had the puck at the dot with nobody within a stick’s length of him.
“I would like it noted,” Rook said, gliding back to the line, “that an actual Minnesota defenseman is slower than I am.”
“Nobody’s noting that,” Heath said.
“This league lies to its elders.”
We ran it until the second turn was muscle memory, and then Coach Markel moved his cones, and we ran it some more. My body worked out the pattern quickly.
The hallway afterward was crowded again, and it took me a second to sort out why it looked wrong. It was the same size crowd as during the bad weeks. Twice the normal cameras, faces from national shows, and a boom mic. The difference was in their faces. I saw smiles.
Varga surveyed all of it from the tunnel mouth with his gloves under one arm.
“Look at this, Rafe,” he said. “This is a different crowd. Today, they love love. Do you know who did this?”
“Max,” I said.
“Correction. I did this. In November, I taught you to be boring, and you were boring at the correct professional level for five months, so when the interesting thing finally happened, the city was starving for something new.” He nodded at his own logic. “You’re welcome. Yes, Max helped.”
“Max helped,” Trier said, coming up the tunnel behind us. “That should be the title of the video, Max Helps.”
I was almost to the room when Mark came around the corner with his phone in one hand and a folder under his arm.
“There he is.” He didn’t stop walking. “We still good for eleven thirty? Small room upstairs, the same one as always. Won’t take long.”
“I’ll be there.”
“Great.” He was already past me. “Good skate?”
“Yes.”
“Good,” he said, and then was gone around the corner.
***
At eleven twenty-five I climbed the back stairs to the second floor, and it wasn’t until I was in the hallway outside the small PR room, hearing Mark wrapping up a call inside, that I realized I hadn’t thought about the meeting once all morning.
I didn’t know what he was going to ask, and I hadn’t prepared anything to say.
I waited to knock. Inside, Mark said goodbye to whoever it was, and I heard him set the phone down on the desk. Then I knocked, one quick rap.
“Come on in,” Mark said. “Right on time. You want a coffee?”
There was already one on the low desk, sitting on an Ironhawks coaster. I sat down in front of it. Mark stayed in the chair across from me. It was the setup for the January meeting all over again.
“So, first, how are you?” he asked. “There’s been a lot going on lately.”
“I’m good.”
Mark smiled. “Okay. I want to run something by you, and I want to say upfront, the same as always: this is a request, not a demand. You can say no to this, and if you say no, we never speak of it again and nothing changes for you. Understood?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Here’s where we are.” He leaned forward.
“The story flipped. A couple of weeks ago, I had a binder of contingencies for how bad it could get. Today, the same outlets that ran calculated humility are calling me asking for the love story. They’re going to keep calling, Rafe, because right now the story has a hole in it.
Niko doesn’t talk.” He leaned back. “So here’s the idea.
One feature. You sit down once and tell the real story on your terms. Every reporter who calls after that gets pointed at it.
It takes the entire subject off your plate for the rest of the season.
It would take one afternoon. That’s the ask. ”
It was a good pitch. It was January’s pitch with everything wrong scrubbed out of it.
“Take the time you need,” Mark said. “Talk to Hal. Sleep on—“
“No.”
Mark stopped with his mouth still slightly open.
I waited for my chest to tighten, telling me I’d cost somebody something.
It didn’t arrive. My hands rested easy on my knees, and somewhere below us a Zamboni door banged shut and a guy laughed.
“Okay,” Mark said.
We looked at each other, and I gave him my reason.
“This isn’t for the cameras,” I said.
“Yeah,” Mark said. “Okay.”
He picked the folder up off the desk, opened a file drawer, and dropped it inside.
“It’s dead,” he said. “I’ll tell them today. If anybody circles back on it after this week, that’s my problem, not yours.”
“Mark.”
He looked up from the drawer.
“When the story broke,” I said, “you asked me if I knew where it came from. I said no.” My hands stayed easy on my knees.
“A week before it came out, I told one person it wasn’t real.
Somebody outside the deal. She asked me about Max, and the truth just came out of me before I knew it was coming.
I don’t know if that’s where the story started, but I knew it when you asked me, and I told you no anyway. ”
My words didn’t come out smoothly, but they were true.
Mark picked up a pen from the desk and set it back down in the same place.
“Who?” he asked.
“Somebody’s grandmother.”
He sat with that for a second. Then he shook his head slowly.
“Two months,” he said. “You carried it two months, and the one crack in the entire operation was you telling somebody the truth.” He closed the file drawer with his foot.
“I can live with that. The story’s over, and tracing it backward buys nobody anything.
” He looked at me. “Thanks for telling me. You didn’t have to. ”
“Yeah,” I said. “I did.”
He rubbed his chin. “There is an item two, and it’s the fun one. I promised fun. You remember the kid with the glitter sign? The one with the second K backward?”
“He’s got a spot at the glass,” I said.
“His mom wrote to the foundation office. It was a very polite letter. There was a stretch where she couldn’t get him to come to our games.
” Mark’s voice was calm. “He’s coming tonight.
She asked whether there was any way you could be told that Tyler, the kid, never believed any of it.
” He looked at me. “The ask is a signed puck.”
“Yes,” I said.
He smiled and exhaled. “I’ll have one at the bench during warmups. His name’s Tyler, seven years old, and the mom says he wants you to sign it Rafe. No last name.”
“Rafe it is.”
Mark stood, and I stood. He walked me the four steps to the door with a hand on my shoulder. “Go home. Take your nap. It’s a big game tonight.”
***
I napped with the blackout curtains pulled and both alarms set. It was a sound sleep.
I had one text waiting when I woke up.
Niko: Chet says Minnesota plays “heavy.” He’s said it four times and hasn’t defined it once. Define it for me.
Rafe: it means when they hit you it’s hard. also they send two guys after the puck everywhere, all night. we have a plan for that
Niko: Will the plan work?
Rafe: it worked on Rook this morning.
Niko: Good luck tonight.
The arena at six forty was already louder than usual. When we came out for warmups, it was loud like before the arrangement. I listened.
I took my laps and stretched at the red line. At the glass in our corner, wearing a jersey three sizes too big, holding a brand-new sign, was Tyler.
The sign said RAFE in glitter, no K’s to write backwards. His mother stood behind him with her hands on his shoulders. When I broke off my lap and skated toward the glass, he froze.
I pulled the puck out of my glove and held it up so he could see the writing on it. His mouth opened. I reached over the glass and dropped it down into both of his hands. I tapped the glass twice with my glove, and he looked up at his mom with the puck held against his chest as if it were warm.
Over two dozen strangers around him cheered.
I skated back into the flow of the lap. Varga fell in beside me for half a turn.
“You’re one name now, like me,” he said.
“You mean Rafe?”
“Yes, and you should trademark it like I did Varga.”
He peeled off toward the far circle, leaving me to wonder whether the trademark story was true.
The horn sounded, ending warmups, and I banked my last puck off the boards to Tyler’s section on my way to the tunnel.
***
Minnesota won the opening draw and put the puck behind us. Four seconds later, two of them arrived in our corner at the same time. It was exactly what Coach Markel had promised.
Their forecheck wasn’t fast, but it was constant pressure. It came in waves that didn’t care about the last wave. We spent the first ninety seconds of the game learning with our bodies what the tablet had told our minds that morning.
On my first shift, I took a pass along the boards, and everything in me that had been drilled since September said go up ice.
I went sideways instead, cutting toward the middle.
Their winger overran me, and the third-pair defenseman, number 44, swung his hips to cut across.
I brought the puck back the other way. His second turn started and never finished.
I was past him before his skates were under him, and their center had to come down and take me.
That left Heath alone at the face-off dot.
He was so alone that he had time to pick the target of his shot.
The shot went off the goalie’s blocker and out of play. It didn’t go in, but when I sat down, Coach Markel leaned over and said, “That’s there all night.”
“He recovers slowly on his backhand side,” I said.
“Then lean on his backhand side.”
In the second period, six minutes in, we made it work.
It started as a nothing play, a puck banked around the boards that I caught at center ice.
I touched it back to Varga, turned as if I was cutting across, and Varga gave it right back.
Now 44 had us bearing down at full speed: the puck going one way, me going the other, two choices arriving at the same time.
He turned once. I cut back inside him, and he started his second turn.
We never arrived there. I shot short side and high, over the goalie’s glove.
Nineteen thousand people were on their feet.
When it died down, Coach Markel looked down the row at me. “Same look next time.”
Trier leaned in from my other side, breathing hard from his shift. “Section 112,” he said. “Little guy with a puck. He’s been standing the whole game.”
Minnesota tied the game on a net-front scramble that Pratt had no chance to stop. Late in the period, one of their defensemen ran me into the boards hard. The hit was clean. My hip said otherwise. I heard the crowd exhale when I got up and finished my shift.
The horn ended the second with the game 1–1.
In the room, Coach Markel didn’t turn on the video screen. He stood in the middle of the floor and waited for us to quiet down.
“They’ve stopped defending the second turn,” he said. “They’re defending the line instead. You know what that means. It means the second turn is now our game. Twenty minutes.”
Minnesota spent the first shifts of the third in our end, and I heard worry in the crowd’s cheers. Pratt held. Rook blocked one with the top of his foot. Tomorrow it would be purple.
My next shift, a safe play showed itself. Their defenseman pinched down hard along my boards to keep the puck in. The play was to bounce the puck off the boards and live to fight another day.
No.
I took it off the wall instead, under the pinch, and skated out of our zone through the middle of the ice. Nothing came of the rush. It didn’t matter. You could feel the game tilt one degree back toward us.
On the next power-play I shot from the top instead of feeding Heath through the seam everybody saw. Their goalie caught it clean out of the air, but Varga noticed. He knocked his knee into mine when we sat down on the bench.
“They keep guessing pass,” he said.
“I know.”
“Stop being famous for passing.”
“I’m working on it.”
Rook’s shift ended, and I was over the boards with Varga.
Eight minutes left, still 1–1, and their third pair got caught on the ice with our line coming back the other way. I saw 44‘s partner look toward their bench for instructions, and he got nothing.
Tired defensemen protect the middle first. It’s an old hockey truism. That meant the wall was mine. 44 came across to seal it, committing everything, and I felt the whole rink lean with him.
I cut back inside. East, then north.
His second turn died like Coach Markel said it would.
I showed him the cutback and didn’t take it.
He froze between his first turn and his second one, a big man stuck between two plays with his skates committed to neither.
I went straight past his outside shoulder, and I was alone coming down the wing with the noise climbing row by row.
I shot toward the goalie’s far pad, and it went in the net off the far post.
Varga hit me so hard that we nearly went down together. Heath arrived yelling. 2–1, with seven minutes and change left.
Their waves kept coming, and we held on. Rook blocked another shot. Trier took a faceoff with fifty seconds left he had no business winning.
After they pulled their goalie with a minute left, their point man came charging at me.
I banked the puck off the glass to Heath, who skated it to center and took a shot that couldn’t miss.
The crowd buried us in noise, and Varga grabbed my helmet in both gloves.
He shouted in English that I was the best winger he’d ever played with.
The scrum was still double its normal size. A reporter I didn’t recognize stepped forward. “This is the second time in a month you’ve passed up a hat trick. Is it a policy now?”
“It’s not a policy. Their guy was closing.”
Deckert, wearing his gray parka, worked his way to the front. “Rafe. This isn’t about the game. With everything going on, how are you?”
Everyone around him fell silent.
“I’m good,” I said. And then, because Deckert had asked it respectfully, I gave him one more sentence than Varga’s system called for. “It was a hard month, but the important people were good to me. That’s all I’ve got.”
“That’s plenty,” Deckert said.
Then I saw him. Beyond the scrum, toward where the tunnel gives way to the hallway to the parking garage.
Niko. He was in the building. He’d watched the game in person.
He smiled.