Chapter 7 Riley - December 2017, Pittsburgh #3
The place was a rink outside town with a roof from another era and a scoreboard where the number three didn't light. The night manager was a guy named Stan.
I'd found it in October, when I was driving around at midnight.
"Hour of ice," I said, at the counter. "Cash."
Stan pushed a spiral notebook across the counter with a pen tied to it with string. "Sign in," he said.
I picked up the pen and looked at the page, and I thought about it for about a second.
Then I wrote B. Baker.
"What is that?" Nate said, reading it upside down. "That's Hobey Baker."
"That's B. Baker."
"There's no B. Baker."
"There is now." I put the pen down and spread my hands at the empty lobby, which had one vending machine and a bulletin board with a flyer for a learn-to-skate program nobody had taken down in years. "You took the man's trophy off me in Chicago. I'm taking his surname. That's called restitution."
"You changed the letter."
"I changed the letter because I'm not a forger, Nate, I have ethics."
"You're stealing a dead man's name."
"I'm borrowing a dead man's name with a fake mustache on it. Sign the book."
He picked up the pen, and he did not think about it. Not for a second. He printed N. Ellis in block capitals.
"What's Ellis?"
"Nothing. It's random."
"That was not random. That was the fastest thing I've ever seen you do, and you take four minutes to order a sandwich."
"It's a common name."
"Sinclair."
"We're paying by the hour, Kowalski. Get your skates."
Stan took the cash, wrote 1:00 in a column, and went back to a portable television.
We had the building to ourselves and the echo made everything twice as loud.
Half an hour in, hands on knees, both of us cooked from a keep-away game that had turned into something with rules neither of us had agreed to, he said, "One more."
"One more what?"
"Anything. I don't care. Something with a stake on it."
"What stake? You don't want anything, Nate. That's the problem with playing you for money. You've got everything, and whatever you haven't got, somebody sends."
"Then make it something I can't buy," he said.
"Loser owes the winner one honest answer," I said. "Any question. Completely honest. No dodging."
He stood up straight. "That's the worst idea I've ever heard."
"So say no."
He didn't say no.
He skated a slow half circle with his head down, and then he came back and stopped four feet away with his stick across his thighs. "Any question?"
"Yes."
"And you can't lie!"
"You can't lie either, Sinclair. That's the whole point. That's the entire structure."
"Shootout," he said. "Five shots. You take all five. One save and I win."
That rule got proposed as trash talk in an empty rink on a Thursday afternoon and it got ratified like a treaty.
It was the only way either of us knew how to ask the other one for the truth: at gunpoint, as a debt, with a wager over the top of it so you could always say afterward that it was just a game.
I went first. I scored on four straight, and I told him in advance which move was coming every single time, because contempt is a love language.
"Backhand shelf," I said.
"You can't do backhand shelf from there."
"Watch."
I did it from there.
"Five hole," I said, coming in on him. "Sinclair, look at me. I'm telling you where it's going."
"You're an idiot."
It went five hole.
Then he strapped on the goalie pads we'd found in a bin by the bench, which fit him like a costume, and he stoned me on the fifth.
I went forehand, backhand, and he did not bite.
He closed the pad and the puck stayed out, and he stood up in a set of pads with somebody else's name written on the shin in Sharpie and put his arms out like an idiot.
"That's a save," he said.
"Fine." I sat down on the ice, all the way down. "Ask it. Get it over with."
He skated over and stood there looking down at me.
My heart was going through the roof. The two questions I was terrified of were sitting right in the front of my head with the lights on.
One, “What's the paper in your stall really for?”
Two, “Why have you spent ten weeks not asking me for your keychain back, in person, when you knew exactly where I was?”
"No," he said. "I'm banking it."
"You can't bank it."
"There's nothing in the rules about banking it. You invented the rules on the way over here and they're extremely thin." He tapped my skate with his stick. "I'll collect when it's worth collecting."
"That's worse. That's so much worse than just asking me. That's going to sit there, Nate. That's going to sit in my chest."
"I know," he said, and turned and skated one slow lap of that whole empty building with his gloves off and his hands loose at his sides, taking his time about it, buying time, breathing.
I sat on the ice and watched him do it.
Driving home in the last of the light, over the bridge, heat on full, I kept replaying the miss. Forehand, backhand, and the pad closing. And somewhere around the turnoff I realized I could not decide which question I was more afraid of.
And a little after that I realized it didn't matter.
Because somewhere between an elevator in Chicago and a spiral notebook with two fake names in it, the answer to both of them had turned into the same answer.