Chapter 14 Riley - October 2018, Pittsburgh
The word got to Pittsburgh before I did, and it was slump.
Which was a hell of a thing to be carrying when I hadn't played a shift.
There was no puck in September. There was a fitness test, a scrimmage, and a guy from the equipment room asking if I wanted the same skates as last year.
And four men in good suits at a desk in a studio, deciding that the second season of Riley Kowalski was going to be a cautionary tale.
I watched it in the players' lounge with a plate of cut fruit going brown on the table.
"Turn it up, Petro. I want the whole thing. If a man's going to bury me I want to see the shovel."
A man in a checked jacket explained regression to America. He had a graphic with my name on it, a line that went up and then a dotted line that went down, and the dotted line was the future, and the future had already been drawn.
"Nineteen percent shooting," he said. "That comes back. It always comes back. So the question isn't whether Kowalski regresses. It's what's left when he does."
Then they threw it to my guy.
Grant Sinclair did a thing with his hands where he put them flat on the desk before he said the sentence he came to say.
"The league adjusts," he said. "It always adjusts.
That forecheck worked in October because nobody had seen it.
Everybody's seen it now. Every video coach in this sport spent June on Riley Kowalski, and I say that with a lot of affection for the kid.
A motor is not a plan. You can't scheme with a motor. You can only run it until it's done."
Nobody in that lounge said anything.
I got up. "Boys, do you understand what just happened? I got a sequel. Guys wait their whole careers for a sequel."
That got a laugh, which was the point of it.
Then I went into the room and taped the transcript I'd printed that morning at a library computer inside my stall door, next to the one that had been there since 2017. Two of them now, side by side, and the old one had gone soft at the corners from a year of my thumb.
"Fuel," I said, to nobody.
Moose was two stalls down with a skate on his knee. He came over and read the new one all the way through, top to bottom, at his own speed, and then stood back like a man at a gallery. "You are building a wing."
"Yes, big guy. That's the collection. Next year there's an east gallery and a gift shop, and you can buy a little bag of my own bad press for six dollars."
"In Finland we have a saying about the man who saves his own bad weather." He went back to his skate.
A couple of weeks later the club hired Bo Berglund.
The release used the phrase development consultant, which means nothing, over a photograph of a man from 1991 holding a trophy above his head with blood on his face.
Four rings, a thousand-some games, a number in the rafters.
He came from Virginia, Minnesota, up the road from my mother's kitchen, and he had a face like the Range.
He stood at the glass for two days and said nothing to anybody. On the second day I skated by close enough to make it a question, and he looked at me and then looked back at the drill.
On the third day a kid from video came out. "Riley, Bo wants ten minutes with you."
The room had one chair and a screen. Bo sat sideways to it with a remote and did not offer me anything, and then he took my defensive-zone reads apart like a man cleaning a fish.
"Stop." Clip. "There. What are you doing?"
"I'm reading the strong side."
"You're guessing the strong side. There's a difference, and the difference is that your hips are already turned." He rewound and let it run again. "You commit here. Puck goes here a beat later. You were right. Being right is not a system, kid. Being right is a coin that's been landing your way."
"It's landed my way for two hundred games."
"That's what coins do," Bo said, "until they stop. And when they stop, nobody in this building is going to say the word coin. They're going to say the word finished, and they're going to say it about you, and they'll have tape." He clicked to the next one.
Nine clips. He was right about every one of them, and he never raised his voice and never softened it either, and somewhere in the middle I understood that this was the first time in my professional life somebody had spent real work on me without wanting a quote out of it.
At the end he clicked the screen off. "You know what your problem is?"
"I'm going to hear it either way."
"Everybody's been telling you you work hard since you were twelve." He got up. His knees made a noise. "Nobody's told you you're smart. So you don't spend it. You've got a brain in there and you use it like a guy who thinks he'll get in trouble for having one."
He put the remote on the chair and went out. Then I skated after everybody had gone, under half the flood lights, doing the exact reads he'd shown me, badly, over and over, until the guy who cuts the ice put his head out and asked if I was okay.
I started staying late every day after that, and Bo started showing up for the late part. On the third Friday, while I was untying a skate, he said, without any lead into it, "Sunday. Four o'clock. Come eat."
"Come eat where?"
"My house, Riley. Where do you think, a field?"
The house was in the South Hills with a driveway that went up. There was a wreath on the door in October.
The door opened and it was not Bo. It was a trim guy in a cardigan, maybe sixty, glasses pushed up on his head, holding a dish towel. "You're the hockey player."
"I'm one of them."
"You're the loud one, he says." He stood back. "Michael. Come in, it's cold, take your shoes off or don't, I don't care, he cares."
The house smelled like a Sunday. Pot roast and onions, windows steamed at the bottom edges, a game on with the sound off in the other room and nobody watching it.
"Bo," Michael called. "The loud one's here."
"I've got ears."
"You've got one ear and it's the bad one, and it's been the bad one since Nixon."
Bo came out of the kitchen with a wooden spoon in his hand and a towel over his shoulder, looking a lot less like a monument than he did at the rink.
Dinner took two hours. Bo told a story about a flight to Winnipeg in 1988 involving a live turkey, and he told it slow, and a third of the way in Michael said, without looking up, "It was a goose, and the trainer's name was Rudy, not Ricky, and the plane never left the ground."
"The plane taxied."
"Taxiing isn't leaving the ground. That's the entire point of taxiing." Michael pointed the bread knife at me. "Ask him what happened to the goose. Go on. He's never once had the ending."
"There's an ending."
"There's a shrug, Bo. Thirty-one years of a shrug."
Bo pointed the serving fork at me. "Thirty-one years of this."
"You've had thirty-one years of an audience," Michael said, and got up, and came back with more bread, and put his hand flat on Bo's shoulder for about a second on the way past, and took it off again.
Bo took his coffee with a splash of milk and no sugar. Michael made it without asking and put it down by his right hand, which is the side he reaches with.
I noticed it and had nowhere to put it. I was twenty-three and I did not have the equipment, so what I had was a nice house and good soup.
My phone went twice under the table and I looked at it both times.
Nate: Your second period was an embarrassment and you had two points in it. Explain that.
And then a photograph of a tie, taken in a mirror, badly, with a thumb over the corner of it.
I grinned at my own lap and then put the phone face down like a professional.
When I looked up, Michael was looking at me. Not hard, and not in a way I could have called him on. He was clearing a plate with one eyebrow doing something, and he looked across the table at Bo for about a second and a half.
Bo did not look back. "Riley, eat the rest of that, I'm not running a hotel." So I ate the rest of it, and that was the entire conversation, and I did not hear one word of it.
The thread was every night now. Not most nights. Every night, both ends, and it had stopped being a thing I noticed and started being a thing I lived on top of.
Riley: I rate the tie 7/10
Nate: Why?
Riley: the knot's perfect and the pattern's a coward. you own a whole drawer of blue ties and two of them are the same tie and you don't know it
Nate: They are not the same tie. One has a texture.
Riley: a texture
Nate: It's a grenadine. It's a completely different weave, and you would know that if you had ever in your life owned a piece of clothing that didn't come out of a gift bag with a bank's name on it.
Riley: I own a suit
Nate: You own a suit that was sold to you by a man who saw you coming from the parking lot.
Riley: he saw me coming and he was right to. going to sleep. you've got a morning skate and a weave to think about
Nate: Goodnight, Kowalski.
The oversight authority had been running for a full calendar year by then. Nobody had ever voted on it. He had never once refused a proof, and I had never once given a ten.
November 8th, Washington in our building, a team that had beaten us four straight and enjoyed it. I had four points. The second goal came off a read Bo had drawn on a whiteboard a few weeks earlier.
The press wanted regression questions. I gave them a grin and a rink rat line and they printed it. The wing did not get a third exhibit that month.
That night Moose was making one of his terrible protein things in the blender at eleven at night, because Moose did not have a nervous system.
"Your mood," he said, over the noise, "is not random."
"My mood is a delight."
"It is a wave." He shut the blender off. "It goes up for two days. Then it is flat. Then it goes up again. I've looked at the phone in your hand when it goes up, and I would like you to know that I'm a defenseman and very good at watching a thing that keeps repeating."
"Don't do that."
"I could make a graph," Moose said, "but I've decided not to." He drank the thing straight out of the jug and went to bed.
The league sent the bye weeks on a Thursday, an email from the club with a PDF stapled to it and a subject line with the word revised in it.
Most guys looked at it for four seconds and started pricing Cabo.
I looked at it a lot longer, because five days in the third week of January were blocked out gray, and because I've known the Philadelphia Sentinels' schedule better than my own since I was twenty-one.
My phone went that night.
Nate: Proposing my 22nd through the 26th of January for yours. Straight swap, neutral market, Chicago. We're both done there for the year and neither of us goes back. Terms are non-negotiable and the offer is an insult. Take it or don't.
There was no room number in it. No game, no snowstorm, no cancelled flight, no arena in the same city. The schedule had always been the whole legal defense, and he'd gone and found five days with no schedule in them at all, and he'd been rude about it so that either of us could get out.
Riley: this is the single worst offer I've ever received and I've received offers from you. counter attached, accepted under protest, and I want it in the minutes that I was extorted
Nate: Noted.
Riley: you've never been to chicago except to lose
Nate: I've been to Chicago more times than I can count. I won a trophy there.
Riley: and then I took it off you late at night in front of a nation, and you shook my hand about it, and your hand was cold
Nate: Goodnight, Kowalski.
Two days later I drove to a bookstore in a neighborhood I've never had any business being in, bought a guidebook to the city of Chicago, and paid cash. Then I sat in the truck with the engine off and the book on my knee and did not open it.
I've never taken a vacation in my life. My father gets three weeks a year and has barely touched them since I was a kid, and every day he did take was for a funeral or a furnace. In my family a vacation shows up on a bank statement and makes everybody quiet at dinner.
I put the book under the passenger seat, face down, under the ice scraper.
Then I drove home and worked the argument the whole way, out loud, at the windshield, for an audience of nobody: that it's five days, that the league gave them to us, that we're in the same conference so it's basically preparation, that it's logistics.