8. Everett
My phone goes off at midnight with an overly loud squawk that has me sitting upright and gasping. I don’t have any apps that make that sound.
I reach for it, still blinking and stuck inside some dream I was having about Callahan.
It’s the Bureau. Check-in time. Fuck’s sake.
I blink again and reach across and turn on the light. We have three minutes.
The fist on my door arrives ninety seconds later.
I open it. The scent of the beer arrives before he does. He’s still dressed from wherever he’s been, shirt untucked, eyes heavy, one hand braced on my door frame.
“Check-in,” he says. “We’ve got three minutes.”
“I’m aware.”
We both have to be in the frame. That is the entire humiliating point of the exercise. He holds the phone up and out, and I step in beside him, and he is a furnace. Beer and woodsmoke, and the woodsmoke is winning.
“Closer,” he says. “You’re cut off.”
I move an inch. He moves considerably more than an inch. His arm comes around behind me to steady the shot and his hand lands on my shoulder as if it has been there a hundred times.
The photo takes. The app chimes. Neither of us moves.
He looks down at me. At my mouth, to be precise about it. Drunk men are not subtle. “Everett,” he says, low, and it is nothing at all like the way he says Mr. Rourke.
“It’s sent,” I say. “Good night.”
He doesn’t move, and for one long stupid second, neither do I. The heat is coming off him all down my side and my body is voting against me and I am close enough to count his eyelashes.
I put my hand flat on his chest and push. It takes more out of me than I will ever admit to anyone — and he goes. That’s the thing about him. He goes at once, backwards into the hallway, hands coming up like I’ve called a penalty.
“Good night, Mr. Callahan.”
I close the door on whatever he has started to say and stand there with my back against it until his footsteps go away.
Then I lie in the dark for a long time, wide awake, not thinking about his hands. Failing at it.
*
Priya sent it to me while I was sleeping. The clip has been watched two million times before I get out of bed.
I watch it sitting on the edge of the guest bed in a T-shirt. It’s been taken in a bad light, a phone held too low, the sound of a bar behind it, but it’s definitely Callahan.
Somebody off camera asks how’s the new Rourke.
Then the son of a bitch says, “At least the old Rourke had our backs.”
He looks straight into the phone when he says it. Then a deep voice off to the side says “That’s us, thanks, lads,” and it ends.
I watch it more than once. Callahan is drunk. That’s obvious. Not falling down drunk, but there’s a slowness to his words that gives the game away.
The words hurt more than they should. Of course, I’ll have their back. I’m not soulless, but there’s a world of difference between having their back and turning a blind eye.
The whole code thing is so immature. It feels like having to parent a bunch of squabbling kids. I don’t care who started it. You’re not allowed to hit each other in the face. Except they’re not kids, they’re grown alphas.
Calls start coming in from eight-thirty. I set my phone to divert to Priya and she handles most of them: all the sponsors and the media ones. I spend a little time talking to someone from the league office who wants to discuss our response so we can handle any media queries.
We go back and forth a few times and finally agree that the club has no official comment and that unofficially Mr. Callahan was speaking privately about my father, whom he was fond of. There is no dispute between the captain and the ownership. I look forward to seeing the team play later.
That last sentence came out of my mouth on its own and now I am going to a hockey game.
I get dressed and go down the hall.
He is at the kitchen counter eating something out of a bowl standing up. I stop in the doorway further back than I need to.
He takes one look at my face and says, “You’ve seen it.”
“Two million people have seen it. I’ve been taking calls all morning.”
He shrugs, then puts the bowl down.
“Well?” I say.
“Well what?”
“This is the part where you tell me it was out of context, or you’d had a few, or that you didn’t know they were filming.”
“I knew they were filming.”
I did not expect that and it takes me a second. “Then you’re an idiot.”
“Probably.”
“Is that it?”
“What do you want me to say?” He is not shouting. He has his hands on the counter, the same counter where we did that. He is looking at me steadily. I am not going to look away first. “I meant it. I’m not going to stand here and tell you I didn’t mean it.”
I stand there a moment longer. His scent is all over me. The suppressants have not gone down yet, and I want to close the distance so badly that I have to put my hand on the door frame.
“The league has called. Sponsors have called. One of them is worth nineteen million dollars. Maybe you’ll care about that. So now I have to go sit in my father’s box later and get photographed enjoying the game, because the captain of this team went out drinking and decided to have a moment.”
“Oh no,” he says, rolling his eyes. “What a terrible ordeal. I hope you’ll be okay.”
“Oh fuck you.”
“Fuck you too.”
I am absolutely ravenous. I’ve not eaten yet but there is no way that I am going past him to get to the fridge or attempt to close the gap between me and the coffee machine.
*
I have to sit in this damned box for three hours. I’ve not been in it since I was a child. Nothing has changed. Same grubby seats, same brass rail, same view down onto the ice from behind the net.
There is a photograph of Dad on the back wall now, next to the one of the 1998 team.
His usual seat was the fourth one along. I sit in the second.
The sponsors arrive at ten to seven. The naming rights man shakes my hand for a long time and says all the correct things about my father, and behind him is some kind of vice president whose name goes out of my head in the second it takes him to say it.
He sits down next to me and immediately starts talking a mile a minute.
“Now this is the thing about this building,” he says, before the anthem has finished. “Shot volume. You watch the shot volume tonight. They’re second in the league for shot volume and twenty-second for goals, and you know what that tells you.”
“Mm.”
“Shooting percentage. It’s all shooting percentage. Your father and I had this exact conversation, must be three years ago now, and he said to me, he said—”
He is off. He talks through the anthem and the puck drop and the first shift and he does not require anything from me at all. Every so often I say “Mmm” or “Right.” The other guy doesn’t watch the game at all. He’s on his phone, not paying much attention to anything else.
Maybe it’d be better if I had something to distract me too. I can’t spend my time on my phone. It’d be all over the media that I wasn’t into the game after that little stunt Callahan pulled.
I have to pretend to watch the hockey. That isn’t as hard as it sounds, but only because if I were being honest, I’m not really watching the hockey. I am watching number eight.
He is the biggest man on the ice and he skates differently from the rest of them, lower, no wasted movement, and he never looks like he is hurrying and he is always there first.
The building changes when Callahan is on. It gets louder in a different way. Everybody notices. I am not special.
None of this is because I have any interest in the sport.
Second period. He gets hit into the boards in front of us and the whole glass moves and my hand is on the rail before I have decided anything at all.
He gets up. Of course he gets up.
“That’s the thing about Callahan,” the naming-rights man says. “Fifteen years. Fifteen years in one city, you don’t see it anymore. Your father used to say he was the last one of those.”
“Mm.”
“They’ll all be gone in ten years, that type. All these skill guys now.”
He carries on. I watch number eight go back to the bench and shake his head at somebody and laugh at something. I sit here and think about his hands and what I want them to do with me.
There is something badly wrong with me.
He is graceful in a way. You don’t think of hockey as a graceful sport, and I still don’t, but Callahan has a grace to him despite his size. I am mesmerized.
There seems something wrong about watching him like this. I feel like a stalker, but I’m supposed to be here. I’m supposed to be watching.
He looks up at the box once. At least I think he does. It is so fleeting, just his head tilting slightly and then back again.
He knows I am there and I am watching him.
It’s because I am watching Callahan that I don’t see the exact moment that it goes wrong. Later, I watch the replay.
Berg, the youngest player, is on the ice. He has the puck along the far boards and he passes it away, then the whistle goes.
Berg straightens up and turns his head to look for the play. He gets hit from behind. It takes him off his feet into the boards face first.
I notice it only because Callahan straightens and his head snaps toward the boards where Berg has fallen.
I follow his gaze. Berg is down against the boards.
Someone boos. People start getting to their feet.
Down on the ice there are men standing in a rough circle with their hands on their hips and the referees are in the middle of it.
“Get up,” the man next to me whispers. First thing he has said in twenty minutes that was not about statistics.
I don’t want to say what I think. This shit is about the code. The code is what allows it. It’s what allows men to batter each other. It’s not just about being tough. It is dangerous.
They bring out a stretcher. They fit something round his neck first and carry him off.
The announcement takes an age: a five-minute major and a game misconduct. Dorn is thrown out of the game. The building howls at him, and he skates for his tunnel with his gloves still on, in no hurry whatsoever, and pats the glass twice on the way like a man pleased with his work.
They are lining up to start again. The benches shuffle, fresh men coming over the boards, and Callahan comes with them.
I see him do it. He steps on with the line change, and he does not go to the faceoff. He is not sent out, he goes. He crosses the ice in a straight line, dead at Dorn.
He catches him five feet short of the tunnel door.
I watch him drop his gloves on the ice. He does it deliberately, one and then the other. He says something, and the other man says something, and then they have hold of each other’s shirts and they are hitting each other in the face.
I want to roll my eyes. Should have seen that coming.
The building comes up like something detonating.
Every person in this box is on their feet. The man next to me is roaring. He has both arms in the air screaming something over and over. The twelve thousand people in the lower bowl are doing the same thing.
Even the guy on his phone looks up to watch.
Callahan takes a punch that turns his head sideways. He keeps hold and hits back twice and the other man goes down onto one knee with blood on him.
They pull him off. Two officials get an arm each and Callahan lets them, and he skates backwards down the ice with his head up and the whole building on its feet screaming for him. There is blood all over his face.
He looks up.
Not at the crowd. He turns his head as he goes past the blue line and looks straight up at the owner’s box, right at me.
It’s only then that I realize that I am standing too. I have been standing since Berg went down. I am gripping the brass rail with both hands, and the man next to me is shouting himself hoarse, and I have no idea, none, what I am on my feet for.